They announced that "StarCraft" would be released in '96... it wasn't released until '98. Us hardcore Diablo II fans were expecting it earlier this year.
Blizzard's products end up being insanely awesome primarily because they wait until they're done before they are released. You can expect Diablo II to be the best of the genre, to sell millions of copies and to get tons of awards when it's finally released.
The one case of them violating someone's privacy was an honest mistake. One honest mistake is irrelevent compared to the consistant, incredible quality of all of their products. As I said before on this thread, Blizzard is the only reason I still own a licence for Windows 98.
Blizzard has always kept the quality of their games to a higher standard than those of other companies. They could have released StarCraft in 1996... they didn't -- they took two more years to get it "just right".
The end result of their policy is that, even though they release less games than other game companies, *every single game* that they have ever released as "Blizzard Entertainment" has been a best seller... they haven't released a single bad game, or even an overly buggy game. Every patch that they've released to every game that they've made has eithor been a game balance improvement for something that they couldn't have seen without actually releasing the game, a patch to re-arrange the memory image of the game to make cheating more difficult, or an enhancement.
Blizzard and Diablo II are the only reason I still have a Windows partition on this computer, and if I didn't know that the game was going to kick ass before I had even gotten previews of it, Windows would have been nuked for the HD space long ago...
18. Currently there are no products, nor are there likely to be any in the near future, that a significant percentage of consumers world-wide could substitute for Intel-compatible PC operating systems without incurring substantial costs.
This is correct... Linux *is* an Intel-compatible PC operating system.
What this is saying is that there is no new catigory of software that's going to pop up some time soon that will replace Operating Systems.
Given how little the government and legal system seem to understand information technology (e.g. export restrictions on encryption, patents on algorithms, etc.), I am quite worried that if anything is done to MS at all, that it will be counterproductive to everyone.
Read the finding of facts, it appears that Judge J is actually supprisingly clueful as far as O/S tech goes. He manages to correctly discribe three or four things that I would have expected him to screw up.
Actually I think that the general public will not care as much.
Being a monoploy is not "evil" or "wrong" in it self.
Note that he did not merely find that Microsoft was a monopoly, but that Microsoft is a monopoly that is using it's monopoly power to harm competition. That's significantly worse than just being a monopoly.
If all you're doing is serving static HTML pages, then it's straight out $0/licence vs. $NT_COST/licence.
If you're serving dynamic content, you gain significantly in stablility/reliability/cost/security by using *nix/Apache over NT/IIS.
Remember that IIS runs as a kernel service, so if it screws up it kills the kernel, versus Apache, which runs as a multi-process hydra, so if one head dies another pops up in it's place.
As for the CGI issue you talk about deeper in this thread, you can probably work around it by tweaking the CGI.
The newest Netscape Navigator release (the one with the Shop button) has limited support for CSS (Aka. Sufficient that I use CSS on all my websites and call them Netscape compatible)
There are some things that Netscape doesn't do, and when I've wanted to use those capacities of CSS, and I've found other ways to design my sites so that I didn't need to do them.
Mozilla M10 is sufficently stable that I use it to test all my websites. You shouldn't have any problem doing this eithor. It's CSS implementation is better and more accurate than that of MSIE 4.0
The Mozilla development team isn't waiting until it's perfect, the're waiting for it's develpment process to be completed. Mozilla's development plan is specific, detailed, and documented. It's based on Milestones, and it's on Milestone 10. Milestone 11 is to be labeled as a "Usable Beta". When the development process is done, 1.0 will be released.
Your understanding of the reality of the Linux community, and of Open Source projects, leaves a lot to be desired. The Linux Community isn't a corporation, no-one has the power to tell others what to work on. Heck, the Linux Community isn't even an orgainsation (as that would mean that there was some order, there's not), it's a community. What gets worked on and what doesn't is entirely up to the people doing the working.
A charactorisitc of the Linux (OS) software development model is that people work on what they currently need. If someone has a single processor system, they're not going to work on improving multiprocessor support - they're going to work on improving single processor support.
Linux is a fully functional computer operating system for almost any possible purpoise, wether it be a desktop workstation, a web server, or a node in a beowulf cluster doing major number crunching.
Linux, as an O/S, has everything it needs to be perfect desktop machine with three or four minor problems. KDE 2, XF86 4, and Mozilla will solve all of these.
The objective of the Linux movement, if you can even say it has one, is not to build a theoretical perfect O/S. It's to build a usefull, free operating system that can be used for anything that people want to use it for. If people want it to be their pretty GUI appliance desktop O/S, that's fine, and they need a webbrowser for that.
The FreeBSD project, although more centrally organized and with more specific objectives than the "Linux Community", is also a project to produce a free, usable O/S. Remember that in application space, FreeBSD and Linux are basically the same, they both run X, they both need a Window Manager, etc. An app for Linux will run on FreeBSD, and an app for FreeBSD will run on Linux.
As you're not doing central OS develpment stuff, no-one could care less wether you're using Linux or FreeBSD.
If your rights are being messed with by laws, then you ignore the laws. It doesn't matter if this is your right to life, or your right to freedom of action --- if the law is bullshit, it is your *responsibility* to protest it, and ignoring it is a form of protest.
Remember, you only have to make the source code avalible if you've already distributed a binary to someone. So, if you just include both the source and the binary, you can charge as much money as you want and not have any problems.
I'd suggest not Caldera, it has a tendancy to croak on Non-standard hardware (or at least all of *my* nonstandard hardware). The best luck I've had on my laptop (A Compaq Presario 1240) is with SuSE 6.2, wich I reccomend. I was running RH 6.0 before that, and it runs pretty well too.
The only thing Caldera has going for it now is ease of installation - you only have to do that once.
Well, unless there is a -close- to 100% foolproof way of authenticating a digital signature, we're just going to run into the same old hastles we're having now, where signatures are forged or copied, or transactions deliberately tampered with or fabricated.
A GPG digital signature is currently nearly 100% authenticatable.
A digital signature used to sign a document is both specific to that document and specific to that sender. If it was sent by the wrong person, the signature will be invalid. If the data changes between the time of signing and the time of verifying, the signature becomes invalid.
Try playing with GPG [http://www.gnupg.org] for yourself. It's an extremely neat app.
It'd be easier to get rid of patents entirely than it would be to reform them so that they worked properly.
Also, I wasn't saying that information should be forced in to a common, public pool - I just said that once information has been released, it's lame to use law and contracts to prevent it from spreading.
Of course, it is good news. Couldn't agree more. In fact I think the government should put a 1% tax on hardware to fund the FSF. No, seriously.
Oh, so you want everyone to hate the FSF and never use FSF software?
We have too many lame laws and taxes already, we don't need more.
You "Ignorant Socialist Lunatics" have to understand that just because *you* support something is no reason for *everyone* to have to pay to support something.
What Red Hat does may be directly releated to improving/selling Red Hat Linux, but as long as they release all the software that they make under the GPL, and promote RH Linux by means other than bashing the other Linux distros, they're also helping the entire Linux community.
If they can help the world by helping themselves, that's good. The problem comes when they help themselves by harming others... and Red Hat has never done that.
In addition to being able to start with a score of 2 as a "High Karma Logged in User", there are also the moderation catigories "Underrated" and "Overrated" that allow moderators to increase or decrease a post's score without adding a descriptor to it.
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I take it you've never delt with Blizzard before.
They announced that "StarCraft" would be released in '96... it wasn't released until '98. Us hardcore Diablo II fans were expecting it earlier this year.
Blizzard's products end up being insanely awesome primarily because they wait until they're done before they are released. You can expect Diablo II to be the best of the genre, to sell millions of copies and to get tons of awards when it's finally released.
The one case of them violating someone's privacy was an honest mistake. One honest mistake is irrelevent compared to the consistant, incredible quality of all of their products. As I said before on this thread, Blizzard is the only reason I still own a licence for Windows 98.
Blizzard has always kept the quality of their games to a higher standard than those of other companies. They could have released StarCraft in 1996 ... they didn't -- they took two more years to get it "just right".
The end result of their policy is that, even though they release less games than other game companies, *every single game* that they have ever released as "Blizzard Entertainment" has been a best seller... they haven't released a single bad game, or even an overly buggy game. Every patch that they've released to every game that they've made has eithor been a game balance improvement for something that they couldn't have seen without actually releasing the game, a patch to re-arrange the memory image of the game to make cheating more difficult, or an enhancement.
Blizzard and Diablo II are the only reason I still have a Windows partition on this computer, and if I didn't know that the game was going to kick ass before I had even gotten previews of it, Windows would have been nuked for the HD space long ago...
Four words:
Blizzard Entertainment's "Spawning Technology".
Think about Linux distros for a second, they sell as "Operating Systems", right?
Now, how much software is included with the full version of SuSE 6.2? The answer is 4 CDs worth, plus source.
If SuSE gets to include all that stuff as part of their O/S, then why shouldn't Microsoft fill their one measily CD?
Throwing in free apps with an O/S helps the consumer, as long as those apps are *optional* and *replacable*.
This is a case where a script kiddie screwing with the site would be funny, not lame.
This is correct... Linux *is* an Intel-compatible PC operating system.
What this is saying is that there is no new catigory of software that's going to pop up some time soon that will replace Operating Systems.
Read the finding of facts, it appears that Judge J is actually supprisingly clueful as far as O/S tech goes. He manages to correctly discribe three or four things that I would have expected him to screw up.
The judge restricted the area that Microsoft was to be judged as a monopoly to "Intel Desktop Boxes".
Mac OS doesn't run on Intel.
Linux is mostly run on servers (according to Judge J)
So, according to what he was judging, he was correct.
Note that he did not merely find that Microsoft was a monopoly, but that Microsoft is a monopoly that is using it's monopoly power to harm competition. That's significantly worse than just being a monopoly.
If all you're doing is serving static HTML pages, then it's straight out $0/licence vs. $NT_COST/licence.
If you're serving dynamic content, you gain significantly in stablility/reliability/cost/security by using *nix/Apache over NT/IIS.
Remember that IIS runs as a kernel service, so if it screws up it kills the kernel, versus Apache, which runs as a multi-process hydra, so if one head dies another pops up in it's place.
As for the CGI issue you talk about deeper in this thread, you can probably work around it by tweaking the CGI.
The newest Netscape Navigator release (the one with the Shop button) has limited support for CSS (Aka. Sufficient that I use CSS on all my websites and call them Netscape compatible)
There are some things that Netscape doesn't do, and when I've wanted to use those capacities of CSS, and I've found other ways to design my sites so that I didn't need to do them.
Mozilla M10 is sufficently stable that I use it to test all my websites. You shouldn't have any problem doing this eithor. It's CSS implementation is better and more accurate than that of MSIE 4.0
The Mozilla development team isn't waiting until it's perfect, the're waiting for it's develpment process to be completed. Mozilla's development plan is specific, detailed, and documented. It's based on Milestones, and it's on Milestone 10. Milestone 11 is to be labeled as a "Usable Beta". When the development process is done, 1.0 will be released.
Your understanding of the reality of the Linux community, and of Open Source projects, leaves a lot to be desired. The Linux Community isn't a corporation, no-one has the power to tell others what to work on. Heck, the Linux Community isn't even an orgainsation (as that would mean that there was some order, there's not), it's a community. What gets worked on and what doesn't is entirely up to the people doing the working.
A charactorisitc of the Linux (OS) software development model is that people work on what they currently need. If someone has a single processor system, they're not going to work on improving multiprocessor support - they're going to work on improving single processor support.
Linux is a fully functional computer operating system for almost any possible purpoise, wether it be a desktop workstation, a web server, or a node in a beowulf cluster doing major number crunching.
Linux, as an O/S, has everything it needs to be perfect desktop machine with three or four minor problems. KDE 2, XF86 4, and Mozilla will solve all of these.
The objective of the Linux movement, if you can even say it has one, is not to build a theoretical perfect O/S. It's to build a usefull, free operating system that can be used for anything that people want to use it for. If people want it to be their pretty GUI appliance desktop O/S, that's fine, and they need a webbrowser for that.
The FreeBSD project, although more centrally organized and with more specific objectives than the "Linux Community", is also a project to produce a free, usable O/S. Remember that in application space, FreeBSD and Linux are basically the same, they both run X, they both need a Window Manager, etc. An app for Linux will run on FreeBSD, and an app for FreeBSD will run on Linux.
As you're not doing central OS develpment stuff, no-one could care less wether you're using Linux or FreeBSD.
If your rights are being messed with by laws, then you ignore the laws. It doesn't matter if this is your right to life, or your right to freedom of action --- if the law is bullshit, it is your *responsibility* to protest it, and ignoring it is a form of protest.
Remember, you only have to make the source code avalible if you've already distributed a binary to someone. So, if you just include both the source and the binary, you can charge as much money as you want and not have any problems.
The point of the exersize, from Corel's perspective, is the bundled "Corel Office Suite". So no, the whole distro won't be free software.
I'd suggest not Caldera, it has a tendancy to croak on Non-standard hardware (or at least all of *my* nonstandard hardware). The best luck I've had on my laptop (A Compaq Presario 1240) is with SuSE 6.2, wich I reccomend. I was running RH 6.0 before that, and it runs pretty well too.
The only thing Caldera has going for it now is ease of installation - you only have to do that once.
You have to remember that he was a 7th grader... most 7th graders aren't exactly highly skilled in the arts of written language.
You have to remember that he was a 7th grader... most 7th graders aren't exactly highly skilled in the arts of written language.
A GPG digital signature is currently nearly 100% authenticatable.
A digital signature used to sign a document is both specific to that document and specific to that sender. If it was sent by the wrong person, the signature will be invalid. If the data changes between the time of signing and the time of verifying, the signature becomes invalid.
Try playing with GPG [http://www.gnupg.org] for yourself. It's an extremely neat app.
It'd be easier to get rid of patents entirely than it would be to reform them so that they worked properly.
Also, I wasn't saying that information should be forced in to a common, public pool - I just said that once information has been released, it's lame to use law and contracts to prevent it from spreading.
Oh, so you want everyone to hate the FSF and never use FSF software?
We have too many lame laws and taxes already, we don't need more.
You "Ignorant Socialist Lunatics" have to understand that just because *you* support something is no reason for *everyone* to have to pay to support something.
Companies tend to have political goals. Red Hat's political goals are to the benifit of the world in general.
Would you rather they instead have *harmful* political goals and *not* tell us what they were?
What Red Hat does may be directly releated to improving/selling Red Hat Linux, but as long as they release all the software that they make under the GPL, and promote RH Linux by means other than bashing the other Linux distros, they're also helping the entire Linux community.
If they can help the world by helping themselves, that's good. The problem comes when they help themselves by harming others... and Red Hat has never done that.
In addition to being able to start with a score of 2 as a "High Karma Logged in User", there are also the moderation catigories "Underrated" and "Overrated" that allow moderators to increase or decrease a post's score without adding a descriptor to it.