the unmarried Teenage pregnancy rate is well above the nation average. BTW so are the divorce rate, teenage suicide rates,and incidences of domestic violence.
Check your facts before you spread bigoted, inaccurate and made up 'statistics'.
Since I doubt many will read the entire thing,
A number of anti-Mormon and ex-Mormon sources have indicated that the Church's strong belief in chastity before marriage and in the importance of close family ties are a failure. One reference stated: "...a review of social statistics in the State of Utah, which is at least 70% Mormon, shows the rates of divorce, child abuse and teenage pregnancy and suicide are above the national average and climbing"
This information is unreliable. It is typical of the sort of disinformation spread by some anti-Mormon groups. In reality:
The divorce rate in Utah, in which about 70% of the citizens are Mormon, is slightly lower than for the nation generally;
Births to unmarried women is less than half the national average;
Births to teenage mothers is only about three quarters of the rate nationwide. (This includes both unwed mothers and married women)
Rates of mental and addictive disorders are lower than US averages.
We have been unable to check rates of child abuse. However, the Mormon Church's disapproval of corporal punishment of children would probably make those data lower than the national average as well. The rate of successful suicides in Utah is 140 per million (1993 data). This is higher than the national figure of 121 per million. However, this is a deceptive statistic. Suicide rates increase from East to West across the United States and is heavily influenced by the degree of access to firearms. The suicide rate in Utah is slightly less than the average of the Rocky Mountain states.
Anyone who thinks the cli on unix is easy to use is already a unix person. CLIs in general are *not* intuitive. I mean think about it the current metaphors that the GUIs use. You want to move a file in the real work.. you grab it and put it in another folder. You dont say "move this file to there". There is a reason why GUIs have devloped. Because typing in commands is not natural to humans that deal with actual objects.
Actually, I was a CP/M person when I encountered (and instantly hated) my first GUI, however it is a bit of fud that typing commands is not natural. Nothing could be more natural than telling the computer to do something. In Star Trek, commands are given verbally to the computer. Since voice recognition still doesn't work, typing is about the next best thing. GUI's have the advantage of being slightly easier to figure out without documentation, however they are so limited in so many other ways.
You can't do anything that the programmer didn't think of first. Various GUI programs don't interoperate, or if they do, they barely do. UNIX cli programs however are generally designed to take the output from one as input, so one can simply run one program on a file, then run another program on the output from the first.
Or what do you do when you want to do something the designers never thought of? How would I randomly change my email signature under windows for instance. In UNIX (Linux actually) it's a one line shell script with a call to the fortune command. The script is executed at login, but could easily be executed when the email program starts. I don't think this can be done using only GUI concepts without third party software.
Sure you have to learn a bit more for UNIX, but that isn't all bad.
That part said, I suggest for a moment you compare a man page to the help in VMS. Once you learn to read the VMS help you can realy get going right away, and nearly all the help is in consistent easy to read format and hierarchial. Man pages are spotty, confusing, overtechnical where it doesnt need to be, and inconsistent. Look at the man pages for cron(tab). good luck.
I've said ever since I first saw UNIX that the documentation system sucked. Nearly everything is documented, but you have to know something about the command before you can look it up. Even apropos isn't that helpful all the time. Your example however "man cron" supplies a man page, with references to crontab(1) and crontab(5). That is after all how I learned how to use cron. Actually given sufficient patience, most of UNIX can be figured out from the man pages, you only need a small push in the right direction now and again. I do agree however that the UNIX documentation is sorely lacking. Of course that isn't a design fault, it's simply a deficiency that is fairly easy to remedy. Something that the info system tried and failed to do.
You are confusing the presence of security features with security. VMS had plenty of security features, it just managed to be even less secure than UNIX at the time (a pretty amazing feat).
Could you elaborate on this? I was a VMS fan and system manager for a few years, and I've never heard these allegations.
I don't know much about vms, however from several articles I've read, and several people I've talked to, NT security is (on paper) significantly superior to UNIX. However if you need a secure server (read able to be accessed easily by those authorized), most people wouldn't think of using NT, and would instead opt for UNIX. It is easy to have a security model that is wonderfully tight, but an implementation that is broken.
MacOS provides a well-organized and simple interface that allows you to get to the real reason you bought your computer: to do work. . . Unix is just there. It is unadulterated, complicated power. Learn it if you need it or get one of the simpler GUI systems if you don't.
I'm actually kind of excited about the marriage of the macOS and UNIX, however the mac people are still doing some things seriously wrong.
I read a rant recently involving a 'lickable' interface, and the mail app that went with it. This so called application apparently sent some mail by turning it into a TIFF, and trying to send that with broken mime encoding. The user in question found the mail wonderfully easy to compose, the message looked beautiful, but the usability was destroyed when the mailing list refused to accept a 270K attachment image of 8k worth of text.
UNIX followed the bottom up approach. Create a rock stable base on which to build the interface. Mac followed the top down approach. Make the interface first, then build the base. Unfortunatly, UNIX never ended up with a good interface, and Apple never had much of a foundation.
Putting a mac interface on a UNIX foundation goes a long way toward fixing both OS's, however many of the mac designers still make amazingly stupid design decisions for dubious gains in the usability and attractveness of the interface, as the mail client example demonstrates. Is the niceness you get from having a tiff of a mail message (I don't think it all that nice, but I can see that it would keep the 'art' of the message intact) all that good if you can't send it because of the amount of mail generated?
If they do it right, Mac/UNIX can completely blow pretty much all other commercial OS's out of the water, if they do it wrong, it has the potential to have all of the Mac's weaknesses, plus all of UNIX's weaknesses.
Yes there is a risk of IDing legitimate calls as false positives.
Get an answering machine. If it's someone you care about, let them know to leave a message, and you'll pick up if you're there. This cuts the false positives nearly out, and if it's someone who doesn't know you well enough to know you are screening calls that way, and if it's at all important, they'll leave a message.
This should suprise no one. Every large organization is like that. Note the following old, well worn fable.
In the beginning was the plan,
and then the specification;
And the plan was without form,
and the specification was void.
And darkness
was on the faces of the implementors thereof;
And they spake unto their leader,
saying:
"It is a crock of shit,
and smells as of a sewer."
And the leader took pity on them,
and spoke to the project leader:
"It is a crock of excrement,
and none may abide the odor thereof."
And the project leader
spake unto his section head, saying:
"It is a container of excrement,
and it is very strong, such that none may abide it."
The section head then hurried to his department manager,
and informed him thus:
"It is a vessel of fertilizer,
and none may abide its strength."
The department manager carried these words
to his general manager,
and spoke unto him
saying:
"It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants,
and it is very strong."
And so it was that the general manager rejoiced
and delivered the good news unto the Vice President.
"It promoteth growth,
and it is very powerful."
The Vice President rushed to the President's side,
and joyously exclaimed:
"This powerful new software product
will promote the growth of the company!"
And the President looked upon the product,
and saw that it was very good.
After the subsequent disaster, the suits protect themselves
by saying "I was misinformed!", and the implementors are
demoted or fired.
It doesn't matter what you're building, whether software, hardware, ariplanes, buildings, or cheezey poof poofing machines.
Your argument seems predicated on the idea that we'll all magically wake up and a headline reading "Microsoft dead. Hell frozen.", but companies do not usually die that way.
Enron.
A more realistic approach is that Microsoft will start to slim down as profits fall below a certain margin, forcing them to terminate employees. As employees leave, then Microsoft becomes more efficient and more than likely, either their corporate mission will change, or they will produce software with less staff.
That would take a comptete and total change in the Microsoft philosophy of business, and corporate culture. Which would also necessitate the headline "Hell Frozen." Currently the Microsoft masters think they are immune from anything. If something were going on, and the company were loosing money, I tend to doubt they would say much until the company collapsed under its own weight. Like Enron and so many others, they would simply lie about it until it was too late.
I seriously doubt that Microsoft will ever disappear in my or your lifetime.
I tend to agree since long befor the sceneario outlined above happens, BillG and company will have long since purchased legislation banning Open Source Software, and protecting themselves from the pesky legal problems Enron had.
As far as I knew, doing remote control on cars is a pretty old idea, and has been done rather often.
I saw a show on Discovery(?) calle Myth Busters, they actually attemped urban ledgends to see what happened. In this case they did the JATO and the Impalla ledgend. They couldn't get a JATO, so they used some rockets that certian hobbiests use for high launches. They provided more thrust, but shorter duration than the JATO. So they used three fired in sequence.
Since no one actually wanted to drive the thing, they put a servo motor on the steering column, and hooked up devices to the throttle and the brake cables.
The car was 'driven' from a helicopter (they were afraid of getting out of range), and the rockets were ignited from a control panel on the ground. They didn't act as if making the car remote control was that big a deal. They had all the parts needed on hand, and just did it.
For the record, the rocket powered car didn't go nearly as fast as the UL claimed, and it was far too hard to set up. The consensus was that anyone who knew enough to be able to do it would have known enough not to. Even the guys that did it did it in such a way that no one could get hurt.
One wonders if they are going to go the extra mile and enable enable the authorities to eavesdrop on conversations via the phone's microphone. This should not be hard to do and I'd be willing to bet that the code to do this has been slipped in the phones already.
Why go to the effort? Lots of people have been nailed by using cell phones. You only have to sniff the broadcast to 'tap' a cell phone. That's done fairly commonly already, and isn't even difficult for civilians to do.
I hear this crap a lot, and I really hate this argument. There are several major fallicies in it. First, that when you vote, you MUST vote on every office. If you don't like either presidential candidate, leave them blank. There are still senators, representatives, governors (on off years), state representatives, judges, sherrifs, coroners, mayors, and city council members to vote on. Many, if not most of the most moronic 'solutions' come from the STATES, not the federal government. Are you saying that NO ONE has EVER run for ANY office that you feel would be good enough to do the job?
Don't vote for one of the major parties, vote for someone down on the list, vote for yourself, vote for someone you think would be good, even if they aren't running. This country gives you the right to vote for anyone you want to.
If you don't want to do that, leave it blank. You can do that too. Even a completely blank ballot would be some sort of statment. At least you have said that even though you hated every candidate for every office, you cared enough to go down there and cast your ballot
People who don't vote because they don't like the candidates are indistinguishable from those who don't vote because they are apithetic, or just plain too lazy. If you want to truly show that you feel that none of the candidates are qualified, mark the write in and leave it blank, something, if enough people do it, it will eventually get noticed. If you just don't vote, they assume that whatever they do must be ok with you since you didn't object by casting your vote, as that's what counts.
Remember to vote, you have to sign. They keep track of such things (prevents voting twice), legal or not, it is relatively easy to determine who has and has not voted, and if a vocal group is protesting, but not voting, there is very little to be gained by appeasing the non-voting public. If you truly want change you MUST vote, even if it's for nobody.
Myself, I am playing with the idea of using the electoral process to subvert the electoral process. It would involve gettig a 'party' for lack of a better term, picking a candidate from the list of potentials, and voting for them. The candidate would be from a third party, in the case where the election would not be close (Clinton/Dole for example), or for the non-incumbant or non-incumbant party when the outcome of the election is in doubt. Political ideology would be irrelevant since neither really cares about the issues, issues only translate into vote getters. They have been made largely irrelevant since those in power don't want to actually resolve anything. Resolution means that the single issue voters for that issue might find another issue to base their vote on.
No matter what, the only voice that will be heard by the politicians is the vote. If enough consitutients write in to them, they might worry about how that vote will go, but as long as they aren't worried, they will do what gets them money. That's why they ran, that's why they're there, and if something doesn't change with voting behaivor, politicans will NEVER change.
This requires a major hack to install. Not worth celebrating.
Major hack?
mkdir ~/nwn cp -r/dosc/NeverwinterNights/nwn/ambient ~/nwn/ambient . . [getting entire list of directories from instructions] . mv./NWNLinuxClient.tar.gz ~/nwn/ cd ~/nwn/ tar -zxf./NWNLinuxClient.tar.gz./fixinstall./nwn
OK, I'm not 100% sure of a couple of the names, and your paths might be different, but this does not qualify as a major hack. I wouldn't even call it a minor hack. It's a slightly annoying kluge, but that's it.
between files that don't actually exist (patch.key), to libmss not being installed correctly, to libSDL crashing horribly, i still have yet to see it run.
You need to transfer files from a fully updated install, remember to run fixinstall, and run it as the user you installed it as, from the directory it's installed in. Patch.key iirc shows up after 1.28.
Also try updating SDL.
From the Bioware forums, ati cards seemed to be a bit of a problem too, I didn't find anyone who had made one work.
That said, it worked pretty well for me with only a few minor issues.
Check on the Bioware site. There is a forum devoted to the Linux client, and several threads with ideas and tips for getting it to work.
What I know:
Mouse speed seems to be a bit strange. Ati Cards seem to have problems. It runs like molasses with 16 bit color, 24 bit is good though, some report faster than windows, mine was a bit slower however. Gentoo and Debian users seemed to have more trouble than others.
Most of the complaints I heard weren't that Bioware didn't give a Linux client, rather that they promised a Linux client and took forever to deliver. Many of those I engaged in flamewars with on the Bioware site insisted that the entire linux client was a fabrication. This is what pissed them off. I told them that the vast majority of software developers are incompetent, and have no idea how to produce software effectively. They felt they had been lied to. Most stated that they would rather get told to get stuffed straight up than to be told that there wold be a Linux client, then not get one.
2. Copy the following files from a Windows installation of Neverwinter Nights (updated to 1.29) into a directory called, for example, 'nwn':
ambient/* [snip long list of directories] dialog.tlk dialogF.tlk (French, German, Italian, and Spanish)
If you are using ftp to transfer the files, be sure to transfer them in binary mode.
Note the last statment in step 2. You don't need NWN installed on the windows partition of the machine you're using. It only needs to be installed on a machine you can get to. For that matter, I would bet that that machine doesn't even need to be anywhere near up to the task of running NWN. Install it, update it, and use ftp. Bioware is actually suggesting that you get them from another machine.
Other options would include: Grabbing the files from someone who has them and a burner. You might have to get creative and use several cd's as well as creative use of zip, and then be careful to put things where they're supposed to be, but there is no reason it wouldn't work.
Even an old machine with win95osr1 should be able to handle the install, and update scripts. The game doesn't actually have to work on that machine, it only has to install and update.
Third, this is still a beta. From the old Linux update page (Before the beta client was released): Neverwinter Nights Linux Client Installation: There are 2 things you will need for the Neverwinter Nights Linux Client, aside from the Linux Client executable: - the game resources - a CD-Key
You will need to get the Neverwinter Nights game resouces from one of two locations. You can either get them from an existing Windows installation of the English 1.27 build of Neverwinter Nights, or from a Neverwinter Nights Linux Game Resource download that will be available from several mirror sites. Either way, instructions will be provided with the downloads. Why must it be this way, you ask? It is because there is no feasable way to get the game resources from the InstallShield cabinet files on the Windows version CDs.
Read that carefully. There apparently will be resource files for download, they just don't appear to be ready yet. It does make me wonder though, if the Stand alone server can work for getting the resources. I tend to doubt it.
This all said, it would be better to have some sort of installer. As others have posted that such things are possible, and some have claimed to have done it, I suspect that some of the legal issues may have surrounded this specifically, and the necessity to create a click through EULA that can't be bypassed, which would be nearly impossible to do given the nature of the tools available to Linux. Such things give IP Lawyers a terrific case of the vapors, and yes I know that such things are legally ambiguious at best. Don't tell me, tell the lawyer.
After playing NWN under Windows for quite a while, here are my general impressions of the NWN Linux Client.
It's a bit slower than NWN for windows. I don't know if it's their inexpierence with Linux, or the more strict, orthagonality and greater number of layers to X. I suspect a combination of both.[1] On the other hand, it might be because I run a lot more on the Linux side of my machine, and killing a lot of those processes might help
It really needs a Linux installer. I suspect that getting the resources for Linux was some of the Legal issues mentioned on the NWN Linux site. For those without Windows partitions, find a friend with a burner and a windows machine. You might have to zip things, and massage the files because it's about 2gb, but it should work as long as you get everything back where it goes. On the other hand, if you have a windows machine on your network, install it there, update it, and transfer the files to your Linux box. I would be willing to bet that you could make it work even if it doesn't come close to the system requirments. After all, you just need the files, not to play it on that machine. Still, they need to find a way to get an installer.
You don't need the disk in to play. I found that out by accident. I had a different disk in, forgot it wasn't NWN, ran the game, and it worked.
It is still lacking. There isn't movie support (not that I could sit through the movies more than once anyway), and there is no toolkit. These should be added, although it looks like they won't be.
I applaud Bioware for their effort. They have given an ok first showing. They could have and really should have done a lot better, but the incompetance I've seen there isn't any worse than I've seen anywhere else. I think both the bosses and the programmers at Bioware need to be forced to read and pass a comprehension test on The Mythical Man Month, since it appears that they made every classic mistake the book warns about, of course so does virtually every other company that has someone write software for any reason, so I can't condemn them too much.
We want to play nice with anyone that tries to bring games to Linux. After all, it's a risk for them. Their marketers are telling them that Linux just doesn't have that much market share, so there's little reason to support it. If other companies are watching this, and believe me they are, whether or not they decide to support Linux will be determined by what happens to those that have gone before. If the expierence is negative, they will be less likely to support Linux in the long run.
[1] It is handy to be able to export a display etc, but doesn't that add a whole lot ov overhead? It seems to me that it would give much better performance to have a local only X server, for the average desktop machine. Of course include the regular one, but why waste those system resoruces.
That's a good question, I wish I knew the answer. I suspect it's something to do with the need to identify someone yourself. How do you know that a faceless body really is who they say it is? How do you know they didn't make a mistake, or are trying to decieve for some reason?
These tendencies are fairly deeply ingrained, and not easily overcome by logic in most poeple. It's a NEED. It's no more rational than most phobias, that doesn't change the emotional response.
It is true that things are easier when there is a body, even if you can't identify it. That's why they have an open casket funereal even if they have to hide the face.
The deception isn't even unprecidented. It is common practice to give families of fallen soldiers a sealed casket. One of the secrets is that there is often no body in that casket. In war bodies are more often than not unrecoverable, and it's a serious hardship to deal with a large number of dead (eg the Normandy invasion) so mass graves are made.
When bodies are returned, often the 'body' is just a box of dirt. It's not totally unheard of to have someone buried show up later, usually when prisoners are exchanged at the end of a war.
The cases of someone showing up after the funeral are rare, but death holds such a place in the human psyche that the idea bothers a large number of people.
You appear to have completely missed the point of the article. When network gaming first became feasable there was (and frankly still is) a huge push to make everything multiplayer, even if it does not make sense to do so. Even now you get people gasping in astonishment when someone releases a single player only game.
The same pattern is emerging in MMOG's. Someone comes up with a good idea for a game. Then we get a little play:
Marketing: MMOG's make a lot of money. We should do one of those.
PHBOK, we'll make our next game MM.
Writers: The story doesn't really fit. It fits a single player story better.
PHB: We're going to make money. You'll make it fit.
Game designers: This style of game really doesn't lend it self to more than a couple of players.
PHB: We're going to make money. You'll make it fit.
Coders: The game engine won't handle the extra procesing for this game.
PHB: We're going to make money. You'll make it fit.
Customer service: We really don't have the staff to do this.
PHB: We're going to make money. You'll make it fit.
The point of the article was for companies not to fall into the trap of making an MMOG just because they're the popular thing to do.
We had FPS mania, RTS mania, multiplayer mania, and now Massively multiplayer mania. He's not saying "Don't do it." He's saying "If you're going to do it, know that there are a lot of problems, and if you're thinking of only doing it half assed, then don't do it."
He's right. The game industry is perpetually emulating whatever 'winner' is out there right now. We get a lot of moronic derivative games that suck. We pay $50 bucks for a crap game that has pretty pictures and not much else.
If I were giving games awards, I would give Neverwinter Nightes the greatest missed potential award. The original campaign is only slightly better than the average game out there. However the ability to get user created modules is wonderful. However it still misses the point.
What about a simple game engine. You could charge for or even give away the game engine. Then you could write short games for the engine. These would be sold for longer periods of time. Currently a game lasts about 6 months on the shelves. These could be released like books. Kept on the shelves for a while, and still be enjoyable.
A flexible enough engine would allow all manner of stories to be told, While Neverwinter Nights holds everyone to a D&D world, some fairly minor changes to the engine would allow much more flexibility to the stories, and characters. For multiplayer aspects, you would have to be able to set some rules, but that could easily be accomplished as well.
The entire game industry needs to wake up. Stop doing whatever is the newest popular craze. MMOG's have a place. Don't make every game into one, just because it what's happening now. It will bite you.
Now let's look at his statments, and some of your responses.
8: A Huge Team is Required But somebody is obviously making money off of it, so what's the problem again?
Are that many making money off of it? If you had read the article, there is the idea in the game industry that you can write a game, and kind of forget about it. You make a hunk of money and go on to something else. Evidently a lot of these companies are trying that with MMOG's.
Also, can a company without huge resources actually succeed with an MMOG? Or does someone huge need to put out the cash until it can make money?
7: Getting a Credit Card from a Customer is Hard Huh? Not from somebody who actually wants to play the game. Maybe you're talking about the whiny 15 year olds I hear on the XBox forums all the time.
Not just talking about people in the U.S. He specifically said that it was less of a problem here.
6: The Online Industry is Counter-Intuitive to Packaged-Goods Company Management So you look towards other examples of services that have succeeded with "24-hour operations, 365 days a year, with continuous customer support, etc, etc". Is this really a reason not to make an MMOMMOMMORPG? Sony obviously disagrees.
And sony is such a good example of customer service? The point he's making here is that if you don't want to shell out for 24-hour operations IN ADVANCE, you shouldn't make an MMOG.
5: Everything You Know about Single-Player Games is Wrong Um, not really. Plot? Interaction? The mastery of many disciplines????? Sure, there are radical difference in some areas, but a reason not to make a MMORPG? Pretty weak.
In other words, don't take s single player (or even multiplayer game, and slap an MM setup on it, and try to run with it. That's what happened when multiplayer gaming first hit big. Now it seems to be happening with massively multiplayer gaming.
2: There are Lots of Legal Issues Like ANY industry. He refers to Ultima misfortune. Last I heard, ultima was a good example of how not to handle an MMORPG. It was especially bad in it's opening years if I remember right. Customers were revolting in droves. So yeah, if you screw your fanbase over, I can see the potential legal issues.
There are more here. Now you get sued because someone lost an item. You either have to get huge numbers of small judgments against you, or you have to send someone to represent you in small claims court. He noted specifically what was going on in the article. If something happens in a single player game, no big deal, but these non-existant items in MMORPG's now have real world value. That means that if someone gets an item, and looses it even if it was their fault they can sue you in small claims court. You then either have to pay them off, or go to the expense of sending someone to their court to represent your company. Either could get expensive. Once again his point isn't "Don't do it." it's "Don't do it if you're not prepare do handle this."
After reading your responses I'm sure you didn't actually read the article. Or at least, not the whole article. All he really said is that the game industry is broken, and will do dumb things just because someone else did it and made it work. He's encouraging the game makers, not to do a half assed MMOG. That's all.
I would think that a huge problem regarding face transplants would be getting the family to go along with it.
There is a lot of importance attached to having an open casket funeral, and for a lot of people there is a significant need to see and identify the body in order to accept that that particular person is gone. An anonymous body, or an urn full of ashes just doesn't cut it for most people. Particularly when there has been a serious accident.
Removal of the face will make such things impossible. Mourners will not be able to come and see the face of the decased, this makes it more difficult to accept.
I had a friend of mine die in an airplane crash. I refused to believe that he was dead until I saw the body. Even then, I had trouble accepting it because although they rebuilt most of his face, it was pretty badly messed up, and they had to put sheer veils over the casket so you couldn't look too close.
A mortitian once told me a story about someone who had died when their head was crushed. Normally this would make an open casket funeral impossible, however since this person was into motorcycles, they placed his helment where his head should go, put some black paper behind the visor, and had the casket open.
If people are willing to go to these lengths, a facial transplant isn't going to go over too well with the next of kin all that often.
With other organs, there is little or no distinguishable difference. Even the eyes can be donated, and the difference fixed up so that you generally can't tell. The entire face however is going to cause problems for a lot of people, and psyhological need to see the deceased one last time.
Privatizing NASA may not be the best move.
on
More on Columbia
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I've seen a lot of comments about either privatizing NASA or doing something to otherwise make them compete. There seems to be an attitude that competitition increases innovation, but does it really?
It can, but it can also backfire. Examine the breakup of AT&T. Several good things came out of it: Better customer service, lower prices, more consumer freedom. But there were also losses. AT&T's entire research division is basically gone. Without it there would have been no C or UNIX.
The problem is that you have to make something profitable before a company will do anything, and generally it has to be profitable within the next three months. Remember, if you are running a company, you are answerable to the stockholders. If they loose money in a quarter, YOU get into trouble.
The problem is that a lot of cool things can't be done in three months, or eve three years. There has to be someone with deep pockets and less immeadate accountability to someone in order to try the financially risky stuff.
Major governments don't have the R&D money to get into space. Companies won't either, and if you privatize it, what you get is a space monopoly that can charge what it wants. It won't violate the antitrust act, because it won't have to. The massive money required to start anything will be sufficient barrier to entry.
What privatization often does is to set up businesses that don't innovate because they don't have the money to innovate. Everything has to go to beating out the other guy. Greater supply for less money is where all the creative energies go.
This will get us cheap sattelites, but very little in the way of scientific advancement or manned space travel, because it ISN'T profitable, and isn't forseen to be profitable in the near future.
Would hubble have gone up were NASA a private entity? Would it have even been built? There is no return on investment. Sure we've learned a lot of cool stuff, but it doesen't make people money tomorrow so it is of little value to a private company. Maybe it would have gone up, but then would the information recieved have been propritary? Only able to be looked at and used if you paid the price? Companies don't do anything out of the goodness of their hearts.
How many journals etc are starting to require fees for access? How many articles have there been about the conflicts between libraries and publishers?
If space travel enters the private sector, I fear that it will become something that doesn't benefit society as a whole, but only those with the money to pay.
No more pure science done in space. If there's immeadate profit you get something done, if there isn't it might get done if you pay them enough to do it.
Such is the problem with pure science. It takes years or even decades before practical results are found, yet most if not all of our technology was based on discoveries made far earlier than the practical application.
You don't just check the machines, (Of which there are not 10,000, that's users not machines). You have to physically go to each and every office in each and every department and make sure that there is no unlicened software on any box. Then you must correlate this with license slips, cd's and whatever else you may need to as per each individual license.
That means that on a per seat licence you have that in order. If you're using a per user license things are different. If the licence allows for multiple copies, you have to check against how many copies there are.
To make matters worse, each department would be in charge of keeping track of things seperatly, and it would be necessary to set up appoitments with someone in the department for each and every machine.
Just to remove the Novell netware client from faculty machines (in preparation for dumping Novell) is proving to be a monumental task. It has taken months, just to correlate with everyone else.
You seem to fail to understand that Universities like all large orginazations are Political entities. You just go down a row of machines and verify that everything on an nice neat little list is accounted for. You have to go all over a campus the size of a small town and deal with disorganized and non-existant records. You have to deal with people who will refuse to deal with 'interns', and people who will pitch complete fits because they won't be able to use the software they want to. You have people who will assume that because you knew about computers and that you were in the vecintiy of their office, you must have caused any problems that occur with their machine.
$2,000,000 isn't that hard to believe at all. If everything were in something like a large cubicle farm, maybe, but it isn't it's scattered in over a hundered buildings over three towns.
A University isn't your bedroom with a few computers in it. It's a huge organization that can be difficult to deal with.
True the actual cost of just looking at each machine would be less than the $200 you mention, but the total cost, including diverting people from their regular jobs to look for the physical documents verifying the license. This all assumes that such things exist, and that they remember where they put it.
Keep in mind that it also takes real effort to figure out what the agreement means. Just to determine if you are in violation of it.
If you want just interns to do things, you won't get very far. The 'interns' would come from the student body. They would be poorly trained or untrained for such things. They would likely be working in a first job, and not particularly competent, and that even if they are, these are University Professors that they will often be dealing with. Now there are some good professors out there, but a huge number are arrogant asses who steadfastly refuse to listen to any student reguarding anything of that nature. I took an F in a class when I was a freshman because I corrected the professor (in a music class) in his confusion over the difference between a 3.5" floppy and a 'hard disk'.
Maybe in a large company, the CEO could mandate compliance and things could get done more easily, but in a university, it isn't very likely.
Why do you think this particular protection scheme has worked so well against schools in particular? Because of the looser way things are done.
They don't have to fire him for refusing to provide the info. They can find any number of reasons to fire him if they really want to. That's how such things usually work.
When someone comes up with a replacement media that does ALL of the following, I'll be ready to dump my floppy.
Is a bootable device.
Is supported completely in all bioses, both read and write access (no propritary extensions, no software drivers, no special software).
Is rewritable for a huge number of times (CD-RW's aren't)
Is cheap enough that I don't care about the media. (Zip Disks are too expensive).
Is small enough to carry without being so small as to get lost (external hard drives are too big, smart media although nice, is too small).
The drive also needs to be cheap enough that it is a trivial cost to a machine.
I've heard all the rebuttals, and they're crap.
Bootable CD's come closest to doing everyting floppies do, but there are still problems. They require special software to write, cdrw drives while not particularly expensive are still sufficiently expensive that they're often not included to lower the cost.
Some have said that smaller files can be transfered across networks, but that assumes that there is a network present, and you can get it running. If something is seriously wrong, and you can't tell what because you can't get any software to the machine, you're pretty much screwed without some type of transferable media.
Sure, it's true you rarely need floppies now, but there are occasions that you would be totally screwed without one.
Give me something as reliable as a floppy (at least as reliable as they used to be), and as flexible, and I'll be first in line to fire my floppy drive out of a floppy drive cannon, but untill then, I'll keep it around for a while.
When I go to Best Buy, and give a company like Apple - who is a member of the BSA IIRC - $129 for a copy of MacOSX how is that extortion? How are my rights being violated? Why is that idea so offensive to so many people?
Dude, you're way missing the point here. Sure a lot of people feel strongly enough against non-Free Software that they won't buy it, but this case is different.
The BSA is essentially running a protection scheme. Here's the scenario: Let's say you run a business that's large enough that it's difficult to keep total track of everything on every machine.
You don't (purposely) violate any software licenses, and take pains to follow them correctly. However there is significant overhead to keeping track of what you can and can't do with the software you've bought, and violations are sure to occur. There's just too much to do not to make an error.
Some employee you've pissed off (and if you're an employer you will piss off an employee) goes to the BSA and tells on you. They don't need actual evidence. To audit you. They 'nicely' tell you to audit yourself and give them money for anything that might not be compliant.
Let's say that you can't find proof that you purchased some of the software you purchased. You then have to pay for that AGAIN. If you don't pay them for it, and they audit you, you then have to pay for it anyway, plus exorbidant fines because you couldn't proove that you weren't guilty of a crime.
They also use this as a scare tactic to scare people from going to Open Source, or even competitors. If you are looking at not renewing a licence you get a message that you might be audited. Even if you are in total compliance, it's rather expensive and labor intensive to go and make sure. Were my university to be audited, it would cost around $2,000,000 just to double check, and given the number of people using computers (about 10,000) it is virtually guaranteed that someone somewhere either wasn't careful with licensing proof, or just flat out pirated something.
What they are doing is no different than the Mafia vandalizing someone's business and then asking money to make sure such things don't happen again. It's protection money, nothing more nothing less. They just couch it in a slightly less ominous sounding name.
Many Open Source advocates have no problems with paying for software, music, movies or books. What causes problems is when someone tells me I can't do what I want with the media I've bought that I get a little upset.
If I want to make a mix for my car, the law says I have that right. They're trying to stop me. If I want to use software on a different machine, I have that right. Under strict copyright law (may be different under DMCA now), I can put software on any number of machines as long as they aren't being used concurrently. I can copy movies or cd's (as many times as I want) as long as I don't distribute them. As long as I dont' redistribute what I do, I can do whatever I want with what I've purchased.
Under the Constitution of the United States, it is not my responsibility to prove my innocence, it is your responsibility to prove my guilt. If you can't prove my guilt, I am to be considered innocent. The BSA has neatly ignored this, and gotten courts to go along with unconstitutional legislation. Fines are imposed without trial, and without proof of guilt, in direct opposition to the Constitution.
More than a Boycott needs to be done to the members of the BSA. There needs to be a trial that addresses flagrant violations of the constitutional rights of individuals all over the United States, and an appropiate punishment needs to be given.
Slashdot Mirror
the unmarried Teenage pregnancy rate is well above the nation average. BTW so are the divorce rate, teenage suicide rates ,and incidences of domestic violence.
WRONG!
Check your facts before you spread bigoted, inaccurate and made up 'statistics'.
Since I doubt many will read the entire thing,
A number of anti-Mormon and ex-Mormon sources have indicated that the Church's strong belief in chastity before marriage and in the importance of close family ties are a failure. One reference stated:
"...a review of social statistics in the State of Utah, which is at least 70% Mormon, shows the rates of divorce, child abuse and teenage pregnancy and suicide are above the national average and climbing"
This information is unreliable. It is typical of the sort of disinformation spread by some anti-Mormon groups. In reality:
The divorce rate in Utah, in which about 70% of the citizens are Mormon, is slightly lower than for the nation generally;
Births to unmarried women is less than half the national average;
Births to teenage mothers is only about three quarters of the rate nationwide. (This includes both unwed mothers and married women)
Rates of mental and addictive disorders are lower than US averages.
We have been unable to check rates of child abuse. However, the Mormon Church's disapproval of corporal punishment of children would probably make those data lower than the national average as well. The rate of successful suicides in Utah is 140 per million (1993 data). This is higher than the national figure of 121 per million. However, this is a deceptive statistic. Suicide rates increase from East to West across the United States and is heavily influenced by the degree of access to firearms. The suicide rate in Utah is slightly less than the average of the Rocky Mountain states.
Anyone who thinks the cli on unix is easy to use is already a unix person. CLIs in general are *not* intuitive. I mean think about it the current metaphors that the GUIs use. You want to move a file in the real work.. you grab it and put it in another folder. You dont say "move this file to there". There is a reason why GUIs have devloped. Because typing in commands is not natural to humans that deal with actual objects.
Actually, I was a CP/M person when I encountered (and instantly hated) my first GUI, however it is a bit of fud that typing commands is not natural. Nothing could be more natural than telling the computer to do something. In Star Trek, commands are given verbally to the computer. Since voice recognition still doesn't work, typing is about the next best thing. GUI's have the advantage of being slightly easier to figure out without documentation, however they are so limited in so many other ways.
You can't do anything that the programmer didn't think of first. Various GUI programs don't interoperate, or if they do, they barely do. UNIX cli programs however are generally designed to take the output from one as input, so one can simply run one program on a file, then run another program on the output from the first.
Or what do you do when you want to do something the designers never thought of? How would I randomly change my email signature under windows for instance. In UNIX (Linux actually) it's a one line shell script with a call to the fortune command. The script is executed at login, but could easily be executed when the email program starts. I don't think this can be done using only GUI concepts without third party software.
Sure you have to learn a bit more for UNIX, but that isn't all bad.
That part said, I suggest for a moment you compare a man page to the help in VMS. Once you learn to read the VMS help you can realy get going right away, and nearly all the help is in consistent easy to read format and hierarchial. Man pages are spotty, confusing, overtechnical where it doesnt need to be, and inconsistent. Look at the man pages for cron(tab). good luck.
I've said ever since I first saw UNIX that the documentation system sucked. Nearly everything is documented, but you have to know something about the command before you can look it up. Even apropos isn't that helpful all the time. Your example however "man cron" supplies a man page, with references to crontab(1) and crontab(5). That is after all how I learned how to use cron. Actually given sufficient patience, most of UNIX can be figured out from the man pages, you only need a small push in the right direction now and again. I do agree however that the UNIX documentation is sorely lacking. Of course that isn't a design fault, it's simply a deficiency that is fairly easy to remedy. Something that the info system tried and failed to do.
Oh, thank god, a mirror of a Microsoft site!!! Like they're ever going to get /.ed :)
Well, apparently they did, as the link has been removed "...while waiting for the brou-ha-ha on Slashdot to die down."
You are confusing the presence of security features with security. VMS had plenty of security features, it just managed to be even less secure than UNIX at the time (a pretty amazing feat).
Could you elaborate on this? I was a VMS fan and system manager for a few years, and I've never heard these allegations.
I don't know much about vms, however from several articles I've read, and several people I've talked to, NT security is (on paper) significantly superior to UNIX. However if you need a secure server (read able to be accessed easily by those authorized), most people wouldn't think of using NT, and would instead opt for UNIX. It is easy to have a security model that is wonderfully tight, but an implementation that is broken.
MacOS provides a well-organized and simple interface that allows you to get to the real reason you bought your computer: to do work.
.
.
Unix is just there. It is unadulterated, complicated power. Learn it if you need it or get one of the simpler GUI systems if you don't.
I'm actually kind of excited about the marriage of the macOS and UNIX, however the mac people are still doing some things seriously wrong.
I read a rant recently involving a 'lickable' interface, and the mail app that went with it. This so called application apparently sent some mail by turning it into a TIFF, and trying to send that with broken mime encoding. The user in question found the mail wonderfully easy to compose, the message looked beautiful, but the usability was destroyed when the mailing list refused to accept a 270K attachment image of 8k worth of text.
UNIX followed the bottom up approach. Create a rock stable base on which to build the interface. Mac followed the top down approach. Make the interface first, then build the base. Unfortunatly, UNIX never ended up with a good interface, and Apple never had much of a foundation.
Networking was nearly impossiblle, with fatal errors caused by such things as leaving the mouse button down too long
Putting a mac interface on a UNIX foundation goes a long way toward fixing both OS's, however many of the mac designers still make amazingly stupid design decisions for dubious gains in the usability and attractveness of the interface, as the mail client example demonstrates. Is the niceness you get from having a tiff of a mail message (I don't think it all that nice, but I can see that it would keep the 'art' of the message intact) all that good if you can't send it because of the amount of mail generated?
If they do it right, Mac/UNIX can completely blow pretty much all other commercial OS's out of the water, if they do it wrong, it has the potential to have all of the Mac's weaknesses, plus all of UNIX's weaknesses.
Yes there is a risk of IDing legitimate calls as false positives.
Get an answering machine. If it's someone you care about, let them know to leave a message, and you'll pick up if you're there. This cuts the false positives nearly out, and if it's someone who doesn't know you well enough to know you are screening calls that way, and if it's at all important, they'll leave a message.
They never have and are unlikely to start now.
This should suprise no one. Every large organization is like that. Note the following old, well worn fable.
In the beginning was the plan,
and then the specification;
And the plan was without form,
and the specification was void.
And darkness
was on the faces of the implementors thereof;
And they spake unto their leader,
saying:
"It is a crock of shit,
and smells as of a sewer."
And the leader took pity on them,
and spoke to the project leader:
"It is a crock of excrement,
and none may abide the odor thereof."
And the project leader
spake unto his section head, saying:
"It is a container of excrement,
and it is very strong, such that none may abide it."
The section head then hurried to his department manager,
and informed him thus:
"It is a vessel of fertilizer,
and none may abide its strength."
The department manager carried these words
to his general manager,
and spoke unto him
saying:
"It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants,
and it is very strong."
And so it was that the general manager rejoiced
and delivered the good news unto the Vice President.
"It promoteth growth,
and it is very powerful."
The Vice President rushed to the President's side,
and joyously exclaimed:
"This powerful new software product
will promote the growth of the company!"
And the President looked upon the product,
and saw that it was very good.
After the subsequent disaster, the suits protect themselves
by saying "I was misinformed!", and the implementors are
demoted or fired.
It doesn't matter what you're building, whether software, hardware, ariplanes, buildings, or cheezey poof poofing machines.
Maybe Slashdot should adopt a category for US centric news?
FAQ
Your argument seems predicated on the idea that we'll all magically wake up and a headline reading "Microsoft dead. Hell frozen.", but companies do not usually die that way.
Enron.
A more realistic approach is that Microsoft will start to slim down as profits fall below a certain margin, forcing them to terminate employees. As employees leave, then Microsoft becomes more efficient and more than likely, either their corporate mission will change, or they will produce software with less staff.
That would take a comptete and total change in the Microsoft philosophy of business, and corporate culture. Which would also necessitate the headline "Hell Frozen." Currently the Microsoft masters think they are immune from anything. If something were going on, and the company were loosing money, I tend to doubt they would say much until the company collapsed under its own weight. Like Enron and so many others, they would simply lie about it until it was too late.
I seriously doubt that Microsoft will ever disappear in my or your lifetime.
I tend to agree since long befor the sceneario outlined above happens, BillG and company will have long since purchased legislation banning Open Source Software, and protecting themselves from the pesky legal problems Enron had.
As far as I knew, doing remote control on cars is a pretty old idea, and has been done rather often.
I saw a show on Discovery(?) calle Myth Busters, they actually attemped urban ledgends to see what happened. In this case they did the JATO and the Impalla ledgend. They couldn't get a JATO, so they used some rockets that certian hobbiests use for high launches. They provided more thrust, but shorter duration than the JATO. So they used three fired in sequence.
Since no one actually wanted to drive the thing, they put a servo motor on the steering column, and hooked up devices to the throttle and the brake cables.
The car was 'driven' from a helicopter (they were afraid of getting out of range), and the rockets were ignited from a control panel on the ground. They didn't act as if making the car remote control was that big a deal. They had all the parts needed on hand, and just did it.
For the record, the rocket powered car didn't go nearly as fast as the UL claimed, and it was far too hard to set up. The consensus was that anyone who knew enough to be able to do it would have known enough not to. Even the guys that did it did it in such a way that no one could get hurt.
One wonders if they are going to go the extra mile and enable enable the authorities to eavesdrop on conversations via the phone's microphone. This should not be hard to do and I'd be willing to bet that the code to do this has been slipped in the phones already.
Why go to the effort? Lots of people have been nailed by using cell phones. You only have to sniff the broadcast to 'tap' a cell phone. That's done fairly commonly already, and isn't even difficult for civilians to do.
I cast my vote by chosing not to vote.
I hear this crap a lot, and I really hate this argument. There are several major fallicies in it. First, that when you vote, you MUST vote on every office. If you don't like either presidential candidate, leave them blank. There are still senators, representatives, governors (on off years), state representatives, judges, sherrifs, coroners, mayors, and city council members to vote on. Many, if not most of the most moronic 'solutions' come from the STATES, not the federal government. Are you saying that NO ONE has EVER run for ANY office that you feel would be good enough to do the job?
Don't vote for one of the major parties, vote for someone down on the list, vote for yourself, vote for someone you think would be good, even if they aren't running. This country gives you the right to vote for anyone you want to.
If you don't want to do that, leave it blank. You can do that too. Even a completely blank ballot would be some sort of statment. At least you have said that even though you hated every candidate for every office, you cared enough to go down there and cast your ballot
People who don't vote because they don't like the candidates are indistinguishable from those who don't vote because they are apithetic, or just plain too lazy. If you want to truly show that you feel that none of the candidates are qualified, mark the write in and leave it blank, something, if enough people do it, it will eventually get noticed. If you just don't vote, they assume that whatever they do must be ok with you since you didn't object by casting your vote, as that's what counts.
Remember to vote, you have to sign. They keep track of such things (prevents voting twice), legal or not, it is relatively easy to determine who has and has not voted, and if a vocal group is protesting, but not voting, there is very little to be gained by appeasing the non-voting public. If you truly want change you MUST vote, even if it's for nobody.
Myself, I am playing with the idea of using the electoral process to subvert the electoral process. It would involve gettig a 'party' for lack of a better term, picking a candidate from the list of potentials, and voting for them. The candidate would be from a third party, in the case where the election would not be close (Clinton/Dole for example), or for the non-incumbant or non-incumbant party when the outcome of the election is in doubt. Political ideology would be irrelevant since neither really cares about the issues, issues only translate into vote getters. They have been made largely irrelevant since those in power don't want to actually resolve anything. Resolution means that the single issue voters for that issue might find another issue to base their vote on.
No matter what, the only voice that will be heard by the politicians is the vote. If enough consitutients write in to them, they might worry about how that vote will go, but as long as they aren't worried, they will do what gets them money. That's why they ran, that's why they're there, and if something doesn't change with voting behaivor, politicans will NEVER change.
This requires a major hack to install. Not worth celebrating.
/dosc/NeverwinterNights/nwn/ambient ~/nwn/ambient ./NWNLinuxClient.tar.gz ~/nwn/ ./NWNLinuxClient.tar.gz ./fixinstall ./nwn
Major hack?
mkdir ~/nwn
cp -r
.
. [getting entire list of directories from instructions]
.
mv
cd ~/nwn/
tar -zxf
OK, I'm not 100% sure of a couple of the names, and your paths might be different, but this does not qualify as a major hack. I wouldn't even call it a minor hack. It's a slightly annoying kluge, but that's it.
between files that don't actually exist (patch.key), to libmss not being installed correctly, to libSDL crashing horribly, i still have yet to see it run.
You need to transfer files from a fully updated install, remember to run fixinstall, and run it as the user you installed it as, from the directory it's installed in. Patch.key iirc shows up after 1.28.
Also try updating SDL.
From the Bioware forums, ati cards seemed to be a bit of a problem too, I didn't find anyone who had made one work.
That said, it worked pretty well for me with only a few minor issues.
Check on the Bioware site. There is a forum devoted to the Linux client, and several threads with ideas and tips for getting it to work.
What I know:
Mouse speed seems to be a bit strange.
Ati Cards seem to have problems.
It runs like molasses with 16 bit color, 24 bit is good though, some report faster than windows, mine was a bit slower however.
Gentoo and Debian users seemed to have more trouble than others.
Most of the complaints I heard weren't that Bioware didn't give a Linux client, rather that they promised a Linux client and took forever to deliver. Many of those I engaged in flamewars with on the Bioware site insisted that the entire linux client was a fabrication. This is what pissed them off. I told them that the vast majority of software developers are incompetent, and have no idea how to produce software effectively. They felt they had been lied to. Most stated that they would rather get told to get stuffed straight up than to be told that there wold be a Linux client, then not get one.
First off, there are features missing. Some will be enabled in future builds, as this is beta1. Don't sweat those.
Second, you don't actually need windows installed, all you need is access to the game resources.
From the instructions here
2. Copy the following files from a Windows installation of Neverwinter Nights (updated to 1.29) into a directory called, for example, 'nwn':
ambient/*
[snip long list of directories]
dialog.tlk
dialogF.tlk (French, German, Italian, and Spanish)
If you are using ftp to transfer the files, be sure to transfer them in binary mode.
Note the last statment in step 2. You don't need NWN installed on the windows partition of the machine you're using. It only needs to be installed on a machine you can get to. For that matter, I would bet that that machine doesn't even need to be anywhere near up to the task of running NWN. Install it, update it, and use ftp. Bioware is actually suggesting that you get them from another machine.
Other options would include:
Grabbing the files from someone who has them and a burner. You might have to get creative and use several cd's as well as creative use of zip, and then be careful to put things where they're supposed to be, but there is no reason it wouldn't work.
Even an old machine with win95osr1 should be able to handle the install, and update scripts. The game doesn't actually have to work on that machine, it only has to install and update.
Third, this is still a beta. From the old Linux update page (Before the beta client was released):
Neverwinter Nights Linux Client Installation:
There are 2 things you will need for the Neverwinter Nights Linux Client, aside from the Linux Client executable:
- the game resources
- a CD-Key
You will need to get the Neverwinter Nights game resouces from one of two locations. You can either get them from an existing Windows installation of the English 1.27 build of Neverwinter Nights, or from a Neverwinter Nights Linux Game Resource download that will be available from several mirror sites. Either way, instructions will be provided with the downloads. Why must it be this way, you ask? It is because there is no feasable way to get the game resources from the InstallShield cabinet files on the Windows version CDs.
Read that carefully. There apparently will be resource files for download, they just don't appear to be ready yet. It does make me wonder though, if the Stand alone server can work for getting the resources. I tend to doubt it.
This all said, it would be better to have some sort of installer. As others have posted that such things are possible, and some have claimed to have done it, I suspect that some of the legal issues may have surrounded this specifically, and the necessity to create a click through EULA that can't be bypassed, which would be nearly impossible to do given the nature of the tools available to Linux. Such things give IP Lawyers a terrific case of the vapors, and yes I know that such things are legally ambiguious at best. Don't tell me, tell the lawyer.
I applaud Bioware for their effort. They have given an ok first showing. They could have and really should have done a lot better, but the incompetance I've seen there isn't any worse than I've seen anywhere else. I think both the bosses and the programmers at Bioware need to be forced to read and pass a comprehension test on The Mythical Man Month, since it appears that they made every classic mistake the book warns about, of course so does virtually every other company that has someone write software for any reason, so I can't condemn them too much.
We want to play nice with anyone that tries to bring games to Linux. After all, it's a risk for them. Their marketers are telling them that Linux just doesn't have that much market share, so there's little reason to support it. If other companies are watching this, and believe me they are, whether or not they decide to support Linux will be determined by what happens to those that have gone before. If the expierence is negative, they will be less likely to support Linux in the long run.
[1] It is handy to be able to export a display etc, but doesn't that add a whole lot ov overhead? It seems to me that it would give much better performance to have a local only X server, for the average desktop machine. Of course include the regular one, but why waste those system resoruces.
That's a good question, I wish I knew the answer. I suspect it's something to do with the need to identify someone yourself. How do you know that a faceless body really is who they say it is? How do you know they didn't make a mistake, or are trying to decieve for some reason?
These tendencies are fairly deeply ingrained, and not easily overcome by logic in most poeple. It's a NEED. It's no more rational than most phobias, that doesn't change the emotional response.
It is true that things are easier when there is a body, even if you can't identify it. That's why they have an open casket funereal even if they have to hide the face.
The deception isn't even unprecidented. It is common practice to give families of fallen soldiers a sealed casket. One of the secrets is that there is often no body in that casket. In war bodies are more often than not unrecoverable, and it's a serious hardship to deal with a large number of dead (eg the Normandy invasion) so mass graves are made.
When bodies are returned, often the 'body' is just a box of dirt. It's not totally unheard of to have someone buried show up later, usually when prisoners are exchanged at the end of a war.
The cases of someone showing up after the funeral are rare, but death holds such a place in the human psyche that the idea bothers a large number of people.
You appear to have completely missed the point of the article. When network gaming first became feasable there was (and frankly still is) a huge push to make everything multiplayer, even if it does not make sense to do so. Even now you get people gasping in astonishment when someone releases a single player only game.
The same pattern is emerging in MMOG's. Someone comes up with a good idea for a game. Then we get a little play:
Marketing: MMOG's make a lot of money. We should do one of those.
PHBOK, we'll make our next game MM.
Writers: The story doesn't really fit. It fits a single player story better.
PHB: We're going to make money. You'll make it fit.
Game designers: This style of game really doesn't lend it self to more than a couple of players.
PHB: We're going to make money. You'll make it fit.
Coders: The game engine won't handle the extra procesing for this game.
PHB: We're going to make money. You'll make it fit.
Customer service: We really don't have the staff to do this.
PHB: We're going to make money. You'll make it fit.
The point of the article was for companies not to fall into the trap of making an MMOG just because they're the popular thing to do.
We had FPS mania, RTS mania, multiplayer mania, and now Massively multiplayer mania. He's not saying "Don't do it." He's saying "If you're going to do it, know that there are a lot of problems, and if you're thinking of only doing it half assed, then don't do it."
He's right. The game industry is perpetually emulating whatever 'winner' is out there right now. We get a lot of moronic derivative games that suck. We pay $50 bucks for a crap game that has pretty pictures and not much else.
If I were giving games awards, I would give Neverwinter Nightes the greatest missed potential award. The original campaign is only slightly better than the average game out there. However the ability to get user created modules is wonderful. However it still misses the point.
What about a simple game engine. You could charge for or even give away the game engine. Then you could write short games for the engine. These would be sold for longer periods of time. Currently a game lasts about 6 months on the shelves. These could be released like books. Kept on the shelves for a while, and still be enjoyable.
A flexible enough engine would allow all manner of stories to be told, While Neverwinter Nights holds everyone to a D&D world, some fairly minor changes to the engine would allow much more flexibility to the stories, and characters. For multiplayer aspects, you would have to be able to set some rules, but that could easily be accomplished as well.
The entire game industry needs to wake up. Stop doing whatever is the newest popular craze. MMOG's have a place. Don't make every game into one, just because it what's happening now. It will bite you.
Now let's look at his statments, and some of your responses.
8: A Huge Team is Required
But somebody is obviously making money off of it, so what's the problem again?
Are that many making money off of it? If you had read the article, there is the idea in the game industry that you can write a game, and kind of forget about it. You make a hunk of money and go on to something else. Evidently a lot of these companies are trying that with MMOG's.
Also, can a company without huge resources actually succeed with an MMOG? Or does someone huge need to put out the cash until it can make money?
7: Getting a Credit Card from a Customer is Hard
Huh? Not from somebody who actually wants to play the game. Maybe you're talking about the whiny 15 year olds I hear on the XBox forums all the time.
Not just talking about people in the U.S. He specifically said that it was less of a problem here.
6: The Online Industry is Counter-Intuitive to Packaged-Goods Company Management
So you look towards other examples of services that have succeeded with "24-hour operations, 365 days a year, with continuous customer support, etc, etc". Is this really a reason not to make an MMOMMOMMORPG? Sony obviously disagrees.
And sony is such a good example of customer service? The point he's making here is that if you don't want to shell out for 24-hour operations IN ADVANCE, you shouldn't make an MMOG.
5: Everything You Know about Single-Player Games is Wrong
Um, not really. Plot? Interaction? The mastery of many disciplines????? Sure, there are radical difference in some areas, but a reason not to make a MMORPG? Pretty weak.
In other words, don't take s single player (or even multiplayer game, and slap an MM setup on it, and try to run with it. That's what happened when multiplayer gaming first hit big. Now it seems to be happening with massively multiplayer gaming.
2: There are Lots of Legal Issues
Like ANY industry. He refers to Ultima misfortune. Last I heard, ultima was a good example of how not to handle an MMORPG. It was especially bad in it's opening years if I remember right. Customers were revolting in droves. So yeah, if you screw your fanbase over, I can see the potential legal issues.
There are more here. Now you get sued because someone lost an item. You either have to get huge numbers of small judgments against you, or you have to send someone to represent you in small claims court. He noted specifically what was going on in the article. If something happens in a single player game, no big deal, but these non-existant items in MMORPG's now have real world value. That means that if someone gets an item, and looses it even if it was their fault they can sue you in small claims court. You then either have to pay them off, or go to the expense of sending someone to their court to represent your company. Either could get expensive. Once again his point isn't "Don't do it." it's "Don't do it if you're not prepare do handle this."
After reading your responses I'm sure you didn't actually read the article. Or at least, not the whole article. All he really said is that the game industry is broken, and will do dumb things just because someone else did it and made it work. He's encouraging the game makers, not to do a half assed MMOG. That's all.
I would think that a huge problem regarding face transplants would be getting the family to go along with it.
There is a lot of importance attached to having an open casket funeral, and for a lot of people there is a significant need to see and identify the body in order to accept that that particular person is gone. An anonymous body, or an urn full of ashes just doesn't cut it for most people. Particularly when there has been a serious accident.
Removal of the face will make such things impossible. Mourners will not be able to come and see the face of the decased, this makes it more difficult to accept.
I had a friend of mine die in an airplane crash. I refused to believe that he was dead until I saw the body. Even then, I had trouble accepting it because although they rebuilt most of his face, it was pretty badly messed up, and they had to put sheer veils over the casket so you couldn't look too close.
A mortitian once told me a story about someone who had died when their head was crushed. Normally this would make an open casket funeral impossible, however since this person was into motorcycles, they placed his helment where his head should go, put some black paper behind the visor, and had the casket open.
If people are willing to go to these lengths, a facial transplant isn't going to go over too well with the next of kin all that often.
With other organs, there is little or no distinguishable difference. Even the eyes can be donated, and the difference fixed up so that you generally can't tell. The entire face however is going to cause problems for a lot of people, and psyhological need to see the deceased one last time.
I've seen a lot of comments about either privatizing NASA or doing something to otherwise make them compete. There seems to be an attitude that competitition increases innovation, but does it really?
It can, but it can also backfire. Examine the breakup of AT&T. Several good things came out of it: Better customer service, lower prices, more consumer freedom. But there were also losses. AT&T's entire research division is basically gone. Without it there would have been no C or UNIX.
The problem is that you have to make something profitable before a company will do anything, and generally it has to be profitable within the next three months. Remember, if you are running a company, you are answerable to the stockholders. If they loose money in a quarter, YOU get into trouble.
The problem is that a lot of cool things can't be done in three months, or eve three years. There has to be someone with deep pockets and less immeadate accountability to someone in order to try the financially risky stuff.
Major governments don't have the R&D money to get into space. Companies won't either, and if you privatize it, what you get is a space monopoly that can charge what it wants. It won't violate the antitrust act, because it won't have to. The massive money required to start anything will be sufficient barrier to entry.
What privatization often does is to set up businesses that don't innovate because they don't have the money to innovate. Everything has to go to beating out the other guy. Greater supply for less money is where all the creative energies go.
This will get us cheap sattelites, but very little in the way of scientific advancement or manned space travel, because it ISN'T profitable, and isn't forseen to be profitable in the near future.
Would hubble have gone up were NASA a private entity? Would it have even been built? There is no return on investment. Sure we've learned a lot of cool stuff, but it doesen't make people money tomorrow so it is of little value to a private company. Maybe it would have gone up, but then would the information recieved have been propritary? Only able to be looked at and used if you paid the price? Companies don't do anything out of the goodness of their hearts.
How many journals etc are starting to require fees for access? How many articles have there been about the conflicts between libraries and publishers?
If space travel enters the private sector, I fear that it will become something that doesn't benefit society as a whole, but only those with the money to pay.
No more pure science done in space. If there's immeadate profit you get something done, if there isn't it might get done if you pay them enough to do it.
Such is the problem with pure science. It takes years or even decades before practical results are found, yet most if not all of our technology was based on discoveries made far earlier than the practical application.
You don't just check the machines, (Of which there are not 10,000, that's users not machines). You have to physically go to each and every office in each and every department and make sure that there is no unlicened software on any box. Then you must correlate this with license slips, cd's and whatever else you may need to as per each individual license.
That means that on a per seat licence you have that in order. If you're using a per user license things are different. If the licence allows for multiple copies, you have to check against how many copies there are.
To make matters worse, each department would be in charge of keeping track of things seperatly, and it would be necessary to set up appoitments with someone in the department for each and every machine.
Just to remove the Novell netware client from faculty machines (in preparation for dumping Novell) is proving to be a monumental task. It has taken months, just to correlate with everyone else.
You seem to fail to understand that Universities like all large orginazations are Political entities. You just go down a row of machines and verify that everything on an nice neat little list is accounted for. You have to go all over a campus the size of a small town and deal with disorganized and non-existant records. You have to deal with people who will refuse to deal with 'interns', and people who will pitch complete fits because they won't be able to use the software they want to. You have people who will assume that because you knew about computers and that you were in the vecintiy of their office, you must have caused any problems that occur with their machine.
$2,000,000 isn't that hard to believe at all. If everything were in something like a large cubicle farm, maybe, but it isn't it's scattered in over a hundered buildings over three towns.
A University isn't your bedroom with a few computers in it. It's a huge organization that can be difficult to deal with.
True the actual cost of just looking at each machine would be less than the $200 you mention, but the total cost, including diverting people from their regular jobs to look for the physical documents verifying the license. This all assumes that such things exist, and that they remember where they put it.
Keep in mind that it also takes real effort to figure out what the agreement means. Just to determine if you are in violation of it.
If you want just interns to do things, you won't get very far. The 'interns' would come from the student body. They would be poorly trained or untrained for such things. They would likely be working in a first job, and not particularly competent, and that even if they are, these are University Professors that they will often be dealing with. Now there are some good professors out there, but a huge number are arrogant asses who steadfastly refuse to listen to any student reguarding anything of that nature. I took an F in a class when I was a freshman because I corrected the professor (in a music class) in his confusion over the difference between a 3.5" floppy and a 'hard disk'.
Maybe in a large company, the CEO could mandate compliance and things could get done more easily, but in a university, it isn't very likely.
Why do you think this particular protection scheme has worked so well against schools in particular? Because of the looser way things are done.
They don't have to fire him for refusing to provide the info. They can find any number of reasons to fire him if they really want to. That's how such things usually work.
When someone comes up with a replacement media that does ALL of the following, I'll be ready to dump my floppy.
Is a bootable device.
Is supported completely in all bioses, both read and write access (no propritary extensions, no software drivers, no special software).
Is rewritable for a huge number of times (CD-RW's aren't)
Is cheap enough that I don't care about the media. (Zip Disks are too expensive).
Is small enough to carry without being so small as to get lost (external hard drives are too big, smart media although nice, is too small).
The drive also needs to be cheap enough that it is a trivial cost to a machine.
I've heard all the rebuttals, and they're crap.
Bootable CD's come closest to doing everyting floppies do, but there are still problems. They require special software to write, cdrw drives while not particularly expensive are still sufficiently expensive that they're often not included to lower the cost.
Some have said that smaller files can be transfered across networks, but that assumes that there is a network present, and you can get it running. If something is seriously wrong, and you can't tell what because you can't get any software to the machine, you're pretty much screwed without some type of transferable media.
Sure, it's true you rarely need floppies now, but there are occasions that you would be totally screwed without one.
Give me something as reliable as a floppy (at least as reliable as they used to be), and as flexible, and I'll be first in line to fire my floppy drive out of a floppy drive cannon, but untill then, I'll keep it around for a while.
When I go to Best Buy, and give a company like Apple - who is a member of the BSA IIRC - $129 for a copy of MacOSX how is that extortion? How are my rights being violated? Why is that idea so offensive to so many people?
Dude, you're way missing the point here. Sure a lot of people feel strongly enough against non-Free Software that they won't buy it, but this case is different.
The BSA is essentially running a protection scheme. Here's the scenario: Let's say you run a business that's large enough that it's difficult to keep total track of everything on every machine.
You don't (purposely) violate any software licenses, and take pains to follow them correctly. However there is significant overhead to keeping track of what you can and can't do with the software you've bought, and violations are sure to occur. There's just too much to do not to make an error.
Some employee you've pissed off (and if you're an employer you will piss off an employee) goes to the BSA and tells on you. They don't need actual evidence. To audit you. They 'nicely' tell you to audit yourself and give them money for anything that might not be compliant.
Let's say that you can't find proof that you purchased some of the software you purchased. You then have to pay for that AGAIN. If you don't pay them for it, and they audit you, you then have to pay for it anyway, plus exorbidant fines because you couldn't proove that you weren't guilty of a crime.
They also use this as a scare tactic to scare people from going to Open Source, or even competitors. If you are looking at not renewing a licence you get a message that you might be audited. Even if you are in total compliance, it's rather expensive and labor intensive to go and make sure. Were my university to be audited, it would cost around $2,000,000 just to double check, and given the number of people using computers (about 10,000) it is virtually guaranteed that someone somewhere either wasn't careful with licensing proof, or just flat out pirated something.
What they are doing is no different than the Mafia vandalizing someone's business and then asking money to make sure such things don't happen again. It's protection money, nothing more nothing less. They just couch it in a slightly less ominous sounding name.
Many Open Source advocates have no problems with paying for software, music, movies or books. What causes problems is when someone tells me I can't do what I want with the media I've bought that I get a little upset.
If I want to make a mix for my car, the law says I have that right. They're trying to stop me. If I want to use software on a different machine, I have that right. Under strict copyright law (may be different under DMCA now), I can put software on any number of machines as long as they aren't being used concurrently. I can copy movies or cd's (as many times as I want) as long as I don't distribute them. As long as I dont' redistribute what I do, I can do whatever I want with what I've purchased.
Under the Constitution of the United States, it is not my responsibility to prove my innocence, it is your responsibility to prove my guilt. If you can't prove my guilt, I am to be considered innocent. The BSA has neatly ignored this, and gotten courts to go along with unconstitutional legislation. Fines are imposed without trial, and without proof of guilt, in direct opposition to the Constitution.
More than a Boycott needs to be done to the members of the BSA. There needs to be a trial that addresses flagrant violations of the constitutional rights of individuals all over the United States, and an appropiate punishment needs to be given.