Sorry to burst your bubble, but insisting on open source is akin to saying "All that would pass through this door must be clean of all worldly sins" - it's a nice idea, and a good ideal, but it ain't gonna happen any time soon.
We also confuse the goals. Short term goal - get gaming on Linux so people develop for Linux and to snot Bill G big time. Long term goal - now that we have gaming, get more people to do open source games.
If open source is the way to develop games for Linux, it will increase in size until it becomes the dominant method for game development for Linux. If not, then maybe game designers just don't like Open Source. Don't confuse the religion of Open Source with the movement away from proprietary solutions.
We need both Open Source games and development of games for Linux. The two overlap a bit, but are not the same thing.
Look, I've bought the last four Loki games (oh, ok, skipped one, but I don't play that stuff). And I've been pushing the game shop EFX at Pacific Place to carry more - they now even carry six distros of Linux and half a rack of Linux mags in addition to the Linux games they can get their hands on.
But, even with that, it's still no contest. Install sucks big time. My son's iMac is something he can do himself; Windows is slightly more painful (especially the stupid screen resolution things they do to muck up my settings), but the Linux installs still are like pulling teeth.
So I'm not pushing people just into gaming to go out and do Linux yet. It's just not ready for that type of person.
Face it, your civil rights in a society such as that here in the US end when the profit motive gets in the way. So, just because someone doesn't like you, they can harass you enough that no ISP will carry you and hound you off the Net.
And even the big players, like US Worst or AT&T, won't carry you. It's all in the fine print that you got with the disk, in the file that you didn't page down to read.
And under UCITA, it's all legal and enforceable. Even though you didn't know it.
They don't have to let you have ISP acccounts - it's not like a telephone, where they have to let you have a local call telephone (but not long distance). All the rights you thought you had were sold years ago, at the expense of much dollars by the big telecoms and given to the federal politicians in Congress and the Senate.
[Note - I own shares in AT&T, AOL, and tons of other companies which profit from this situation and probably helped cause it]
There's another version of the story on cNet> - and, unlike the cgi script, it's a real story.
Luckily, under the proposed regulations congress is looking at, the cgi script kiddie would be locked up for 20 years.
Oh, you don't think that's lucky? Well, since noone is complaining to their elected officials (and they screen you out if you don't gave name, address, and phone) you don't get any say in the matter. We already sold your privacy rights in the US, and now we're going to sell the privacy rights of all EU citizens.
Having read the graphic artist's 'Why this matters' it all comes down to this:
It is highly likely that JPEG2K will be included in Netscape, IE and Opera browsers. JPEG2K allows one to set (at the user level) how much compression one needs, and allow one to have different ratios for print downloads and viewing downloads - for example, when printing, I might want 300 to 600 dpi, but while viewing, 90 dpi might be fine for me.
All that said, apparently PNG is still better. But will it be included in IE, Netscape/Mozilla and Opera? OK, one down. But implementations are still not good.
All in all, a better method than JPEG in actual use would be JPEG2K, and it's a good bet it will be available for all browsers, whereas PNG is still hobbled a bit. And much more Open Source!
You can tell how out of touch Metallica is by the drummer's quote about "you don't go out and steal a $47,000 Suburban". I mean, how many college kids can afford something like that. They're lucky if they can afford even $8,000 for a boxy car.
Wake up and smell the class warfare, Metallica! You're the ones on the other side of the revolution...
[note - yeah, I've got the bucks - but most people don't]
Bring something like the airport, already configured with the broadband line (whichever line you support), and have a bunch of relays throughout your home (depending on how big your house is and where structural items will interfere with the signal).
Actually, in about one or two years, I fully expect to be using my WebPad as I drink a cafe' latte' on my deck, thanking Linus for his latest contrib to mobile Linux, and telling my son to remember to dock his GameServer when he's finished playing with it so that it can recharge.
But could we make a Beowulf cluster out of such devices... ?
Sort of like a mailbox, lockable with a one way door, where a delivery person can deposit your latest ebay winnings, thinkgeek loot or fatbrain order without fear that it will be plundered.
They have these for sale at Fred Meyer and various other home hardware stores.
When I went house-hunting, I certainly checked on whether or not a house was DSL-ready and cable modem-ready. One house that I liked was snapped up in days, and they advertised that they had full DSL service.
When I put my house on the market, one of the selling points was that it was both DSL and cable-ready, and that it already had working DSL (1.44) and digital cable at the moment.
And the townhouse I bought, I checked to be sure it was in a service area for DSL - apparently, in Fremont, Center of the Universe (part of Seattle), up to half of all home buyers are techies or graphics artists, so this is a big deal.
that Jon doesn't get it that this opening up is something happening elsewhere. Here, in the US, where he is purported to live, we have more restrictive laws, and our personal freedoms are being chipped away at day by day.
Now, if one were to write an article about how the techno-samurai of the 21st Century will start shopping around for countries to live in, based upon how much personal freedom each one has, that might be an interesting story.
Remember - it's a two-way street - corporations can only control those who let themselves be controlled. People like myself, citizens of multiple countries, can go to France to get booze, winter in the French West Indies, drop by Amsterdam to get a good head of smoke, and go to other countries to live in.
But most technogeeks are not techno-samurai. They have one citizenship, not enough funds to move when they feel like it, not enough corporate holdings to hold the silly regulations at bay, and think they are powerless to change this. But they're not - it is not difficult to choose to game the system if you know what you want.
For exactly the reasons you mentioned, I already bought up a few hundred shares of MSFT in a few of my accounts. Only have to hold them for a year, which means I get the lower capital gains rate anyway.
Now if I can just convince the judge to route a fast appeal to the US Supreme Court, I can cash out and use the money for some of my OpenSource investments...
I mean poor ole BG is down to his last $50 billion...
Next thing you know, we'll see him in his yacht, floating next to I-520 (the floating bridge near his place) and panhandling from the motorists stuck in the traffic jams...
The US is the laughing stock of the world. We took one of the most successful companies in the history of commerce to court, to punish them for being too successful.
No, actually, the European Union is also investigating MSFT for anti-trust, and if we don't break them up, they will. They're not laughing at us, they're sneering at our wimpiness in following our own laws.
The browser is irrelevant
Yeah, we'll all be using Opera anyway. Either that or Mozilla.
Seriously, what if the judge splits them into three companies - OS, Apps, IE/Net - and the European Union decides to split them in four - 2 OS, Apps, IE/Net. The latter to give both OS splits a full set of the Win APIs and encourage real competition.
Nothing says the EU has to do what the US does.
[Note: yes, I've got MSFT shares, as well as RHAT - so I'm on both sides here]
In a perfect world, the virus would create a windows link called "Windows 2000 Bug Fix" which had a link to download and install one of the Linux or BSD distros.
Then try to get promoted above IT...and try...and try...and try..
That's why, if you're going to go management, you need to get something like a PhD in Economics and get into the Line managerial positions. But IT management is like HR management - almost always a dead end.
It's not because you can't do it, it's because other managers will always think of you as a geek, and even in tech firms, geeks aren't let out of the cage unless they own the company.
That said, lawyer jokes are way more popular. My brother is so sensitive about that. IT jokes aren't quite as bad.
Yeah, if you go for an economics degree, you can work anywhere in business.
That said, when programming: don't reinvent the wheel, unless you really like wheels and you really have a better solution. I've seen a lot of performance tire wheels in my day, and a good general wheel is far preferable.
Just like video cards - I don't want to have to know what the card is, unless I'm doing a high-end gaming system, I should just be able to use it. Don't get caught up in the details, unless it makes you very happy when you do so.
Oh, don't ever get into IT management - no other manager will ever respect you, the hours are worse, the pay hardly better at all. If you want to do management, get in different lines of business in different functional areas.
Because, if you go management, they don't let you code very often. If coding turns your crank, you'll wonder "what happened?" when you realize you just do meetings and never have fun anymore. At least in line management they let you play golf or go surfing in Half Moon Bay.
Actually, my main goal in going into Systems Analysis/Programming was to only have to relearn half of what I knew every two years, instead of all of what I knew (when I did hardware).
I try not to get to hung up on OS, or Programming Languages - they're just tools we use to provide frameworks for solutions. Each has it's quirks.
To contribute to society - that's one of my goals. I used to want to code the best game simulations - somehow, that went out the window. Once you've got a bunch of money, that ceases to be such a big deal - so skip that as a motive.
To design a system that, while not the most efficient or fastest, allows one to get one's job done in an elegant and robust fashion - that's what I like doing. I may not make the best wheel, but my wheels allow you to change the tires while driving and use bigger wheels with different treads. I've found my code being used by other people more than ten years later - because it just keeps working. Elegence, simplicity, robustness.
The rest is all carp. A thousand years from now, all the things you think are important will be, at best, a joke.
OK, yes, RIAA is the Devil Incarnate (TM). Yes, Napster is mostly about stealing music for kids who can't pay the oligopoly prices for CDs (which the FTC just forced to allow lower pricings for). Yes, if I just want one song for a quarter, I'm gonna get it somehow.
But, and this is critical, the point is that an MP3 is mobile. I can pop MP3 songs into my directories for The Sims (which I paid for), recorded from CDs that I paid for, to play in my home as background music. One of the CDs that I ripped has music you can't buy in the US, as the music industry decided that they won't let me buy it. Because Yanks don't buy French techno. And they don't listen to Brazilian electronica.
But they do!
That's why Napster is not bad, it's just not always good. There is music they won't let us hear, music I will get at any cost, and music I am quite willing to pay for. And thanks to sites like mp3.com, I have CDs that I couldn't buy (ok, except for the cool music store in my neighborhood of Fremont, Sonic Boom, located in the Center of the Universe).
Until the music industry gets that paradigm, they will lose.
Slashdot Mirror
They'll take away my web links when they pry my keyboard out of my cold dead arms.
...
Oh, wait, they already sold me out in the US/EU treaty that gave up my rights to privacy.
;-(
Never mind
Sorry to burst your bubble, but insisting on open source is akin to saying "All that would pass through this door must be clean of all worldly sins" - it's a nice idea, and a good ideal, but it ain't gonna happen any time soon.
We also confuse the goals. Short term goal - get gaming on Linux so people develop for Linux and to snot Bill G big time. Long term goal - now that we have gaming, get more people to do open source games.
If open source is the way to develop games for Linux, it will increase in size until it becomes the dominant method for game development for Linux. If not, then maybe game designers just don't like Open Source. Don't confuse the religion of Open Source with the movement away from proprietary solutions.
We need both Open Source games and development of games for Linux. The two overlap a bit, but are not the same thing.
Look, I've bought the last four Loki games (oh, ok, skipped one, but I don't play that stuff). And I've been pushing the game shop EFX at Pacific Place to carry more - they now even carry six distros of Linux and half a rack of Linux mags in addition to the Linux games they can get their hands on.
But, even with that, it's still no contest. Install sucks big time. My son's iMac is something he can do himself; Windows is slightly more painful (especially the stupid screen resolution things they do to muck up my settings), but the Linux installs still are like pulling teeth.
So I'm not pushing people just into gaming to go out and do Linux yet. It's just not ready for that type of person.
Wake me after the revolution, ok?
Face it, your civil rights in a society such as that here in the US end when the profit motive gets in the way. So, just because someone doesn't like you, they can harass you enough that no ISP will carry you and hound you off the Net.
And even the big players, like US Worst or AT&T, won't carry you. It's all in the fine print that you got with the disk, in the file that you didn't page down to read.
And under UCITA, it's all legal and enforceable. Even though you didn't know it.
They don't have to let you have ISP acccounts - it's not like a telephone, where they have to let you have a local call telephone (but not long distance). All the rights you thought you had were sold years ago, at the expense of much dollars by the big telecoms and given to the federal politicians in Congress and the Senate.
[Note - I own shares in AT&T, AOL, and tons of other companies which profit from this situation and probably helped cause it]
There's another version of the story on cNet> - and, unlike the cgi script, it's a real story.
Luckily, under the proposed regulations congress is looking at, the cgi script kiddie would be locked up for 20 years.
Oh, you don't think that's lucky? Well, since noone is complaining to their elected officials (and they screen you out if you don't gave name, address, and phone) you don't get any say in the matter. We already sold your privacy rights in the US, and now we're going to sell the privacy rights of all EU citizens.
What ya gonna do about it, cypherpunk?
I hold copyrights. Yes, registered in multiple countries, even.
And I think that MP3 is cool and the enforcers of copyrights are usually corporate pirates, with little of the gains going to the producers.
But I'm also sure that, since there are lawyers involved, noone will win.
Having read the graphic artist's 'Why this matters' it all comes down to this:
It is highly likely that JPEG2K will be included in Netscape, IE and Opera browsers. JPEG2K allows one to set (at the user level) how much compression one needs, and allow one to have different ratios for print downloads and viewing downloads - for example, when printing, I might want 300 to 600 dpi, but while viewing, 90 dpi might be fine for me.
All that said, apparently PNG is still better. But will it be included in IE, Netscape/Mozilla and Opera? OK, one down. But implementations are still not good.
All in all, a better method than JPEG in actual use would be JPEG2K, and it's a good bet it will be available for all browsers, whereas PNG is still hobbled a bit. And much more Open Source!
You can tell how out of touch Metallica is by the drummer's quote about "you don't go out and steal a $47,000 Suburban". I mean, how many college kids can afford something like that. They're lucky if they can afford even $8,000 for a boxy car.
...
Wake up and smell the class warfare, Metallica! You're the ones on the other side of the revolution
[note - yeah, I've got the bucks - but most people don't]
Bring something like the airport, already configured with the broadband line (whichever line you support), and have a bunch of relays throughout your home (depending on how big your house is and where structural items will interfere with the signal).
... ?
Actually, in about one or two years, I fully expect to be using my WebPad as I drink a cafe' latte' on my deck, thanking Linus for his latest contrib to mobile Linux, and telling my son to remember to dock his GameServer when he's finished playing with it so that it can recharge.
But could we make a Beowulf cluster out of such devices
Sort of like a mailbox, lockable with a one way door, where a delivery person can deposit your latest ebay winnings, thinkgeek loot or fatbrain order without fear that it will be plundered.
They have these for sale at Fred Meyer and various other home hardware stores.
When I went house-hunting, I certainly checked on whether or not a house was DSL-ready and cable modem-ready. One house that I liked was snapped up in days, and they advertised that they had full DSL service.
When I put my house on the market, one of the selling points was that it was both DSL and cable-ready, and that it already had working DSL (1.44) and digital cable at the moment.
And the townhouse I bought, I checked to be sure it was in a service area for DSL - apparently, in Fremont, Center of the Universe (part of Seattle), up to half of all home buyers are techies or graphics artists, so this is a big deal.
that Jon doesn't get it that this opening up is something happening elsewhere. Here, in the US, where he is purported to live, we have more restrictive laws, and our personal freedoms are being chipped away at day by day.
Now, if one were to write an article about how the techno-samurai of the 21st Century will start shopping around for countries to live in, based upon how much personal freedom each one has, that might be an interesting story.
Remember - it's a two-way street - corporations can only control those who let themselves be controlled. People like myself, citizens of multiple countries, can go to France to get booze, winter in the French West Indies, drop by Amsterdam to get a good head of smoke, and go to other countries to live in.
But most technogeeks are not techno-samurai. They have one citizenship, not enough funds to move when they feel like it, not enough corporate holdings to hold the silly regulations at bay, and think they are powerless to change this. But they're not - it is not difficult to choose to game the system if you know what you want.
Whatever. It's the one that'll sink next.
..."
Hey, got an idea! Why not put up a billboard next to 520 that says "Will the last person leaving Redmond please down the servers
all three reputable news sources just copied and pasted the same little blurb from some other original source..probably AP News..
...
That's because UPI got bought out by the Moonies, so now there's only AP left. This is why monopolies are bad
Luckily, I get newsfeed from Reuters and Agence France Presse (AFP), which usually covers anything that's really interesting.
For exactly the reasons you mentioned, I already bought up a few hundred shares of MSFT in a few of my accounts. Only have to hold them for a year, which means I get the lower capital gains rate anyway.
...
Now if I can just convince the judge to route a fast appeal to the US Supreme Court, I can cash out and use the money for some of my OpenSource investments
I mean poor ole BG is down to his last $50 billion...
...
Next thing you know, we'll see him in his yacht, floating next to I-520 (the floating bridge near his place) and panhandling from the motorists stuck in the traffic jams
Actually, I own shares of MSFT, and I'm waiting for the breakup with ... anticipation ...
Just give me those shares of the survivors and see my stock double!
The US is the laughing stock of the world. We took one of the most successful companies in the history of commerce to court, to punish them for being too successful.
No, actually, the European Union is also investigating MSFT for anti-trust, and if we don't break them up, they will. They're not laughing at us, they're sneering at our wimpiness in following our own laws.
The browser is irrelevant
Yeah, we'll all be using Opera anyway. Either that or Mozilla.
Seriously, what if the judge splits them into three companies - OS, Apps, IE/Net - and the European Union decides to split them in four - 2 OS, Apps, IE/Net. The latter to give both OS splits a full set of the Win APIs and encourage real competition.
Nothing says the EU has to do what the US does.
[Note: yes, I've got MSFT shares, as well as RHAT - so I'm on both sides here]
In a perfect world, the virus would create a windows link called "Windows 2000 Bug Fix" which had a link to download and install one of the Linux or BSD distros.
Then try to get promoted above IT...and try...and try...and try..
That's why, if you're going to go management, you need to get something like a PhD in Economics and get into the Line managerial positions. But IT management is like HR management - almost always a dead end.
It's not because you can't do it, it's because other managers will always think of you as a geek, and even in tech firms, geeks aren't let out of the cage unless they own the company.
That said, lawyer jokes are way more popular. My brother is so sensitive about that. IT jokes aren't quite as bad.
Seriously, a lot of US citizens want strong encryption, personal privacy, and a lot more.
It's just the monied interests running the government that are against it.
The rest of us are thrilled.
Yeah, if you go for an economics degree, you can work anywhere in business.
That said, when programming: don't reinvent the wheel, unless you really like wheels and you really have a better solution. I've seen a lot of performance tire wheels in my day, and a good general wheel is far preferable.
Just like video cards - I don't want to have to know what the card is, unless I'm doing a high-end gaming system, I should just be able to use it. Don't get caught up in the details, unless it makes you very happy when you do so.
Oh, don't ever get into IT management - no other manager will ever respect you, the hours are worse, the pay hardly better at all. If you want to do management, get in different lines of business in different functional areas.
Because, if you go management, they don't let you code very often. If coding turns your crank, you'll wonder "what happened?" when you realize you just do meetings and never have fun anymore. At least in line management they let you play golf or go surfing in Half Moon Bay.
Actually, my main goal in going into Systems Analysis/Programming was to only have to relearn half of what I knew every two years, instead of all of what I knew (when I did hardware).
I try not to get to hung up on OS, or Programming Languages - they're just tools we use to provide frameworks for solutions. Each has it's quirks.
To contribute to society - that's one of my goals. I used to want to code the best game simulations - somehow, that went out the window. Once you've got a bunch of money, that ceases to be such a big deal - so skip that as a motive.
To design a system that, while not the most efficient or fastest, allows one to get one's job done in an elegant and robust fashion - that's what I like doing. I may not make the best wheel, but my wheels allow you to change the tires while driving and use bigger wheels with different treads. I've found my code being used by other people more than ten years later - because it just keeps working. Elegence, simplicity, robustness.
The rest is all carp. A thousand years from now, all the things you think are important will be, at best, a joke.
OK, yes, RIAA is the Devil Incarnate (TM). Yes, Napster is mostly about stealing music for kids who can't pay the oligopoly prices for CDs (which the FTC just forced to allow lower pricings for). Yes, if I just want one song for a quarter, I'm gonna get it somehow.
But, and this is critical, the point is that an MP3 is mobile. I can pop MP3 songs into my directories for The Sims (which I paid for), recorded from CDs that I paid for, to play in my home as background music. One of the CDs that I ripped has music you can't buy in the US, as the music industry decided that they won't let me buy it. Because Yanks don't buy French techno. And they don't listen to Brazilian electronica.
But they do!
That's why Napster is not bad, it's just not always good. There is music they won't let us hear, music I will get at any cost, and music I am quite willing to pay for. And thanks to sites like mp3.com, I have CDs that I couldn't buy (ok, except for the cool music store in my neighborhood of Fremont, Sonic Boom, located in the Center of the Universe).
Until the music industry gets that paradigm, they will lose.