So that's why the RIAA backed off. Putting on my paranoid geek hat, I'm beginning to wonder: if SDMI had been a success, would they still have gone after him? I think they just might have tried...after all, free speech or no, I can see them arguing that his research threatened the livelihood of thousands of people working for the record companies...or maybe I've just been up too long.
Israel and Palestine continue to have disagreements. Bill Gates has officially gone on record saying that open-source "promotes ulcers". The stock market had a disappointing week. Eric S. Raymond has published his newest essay, "The surprising connections between closed-source software and ingrown toenails". Richard Stallman has published the definitive list distinguishing between "free", "inexpensive", "costly-but compatible with free", and "immoral" software licenses. ...and finally, a heated argument took place at a college between two students debating the merits of vi and emacs.
I'm working on a website powered by ten hamsters running on excercise wheels. This generates enough power to use my old Commodore 64 to host my upcoming web site. I wonder how they will handle the Slashdot effect?
Pretend for a minute that in the future, almost everything will be licensed (your car, your computer, whatever). If I do something that displeases my employer, maybe make some disparaging remarks about them online or something and it gets traced back to me, could they pressure other companies to revoke my licenses, effectively taking everything back from me? Yes, this is paranoia, but the fact is that if I can't own things, they can be taken away.
I once angrily spouted out at a family gathering, "I hate capitalism, but I still want to own my own stuff!" What I didn't realize then is that I actually hated our current system, which technically isn't pure capitalism, or rather, doesn't capture capitalism's ideal of everyone fighting fairly and letting the markets take a logical course of action. Silly me, I used to think logic drove us humans. But what's the alternative? Socialism? Eww.
Jumpman was very innovative for it's day, at least for one thing: the levels weren't static. When you got to certain bombs in certain levels, the terrain would completely reform. This element of surprise was completely ahead of it's time. There were levels where, when you got to a bomb, the world would alternate between one thing being invisible to another, so you were required to pay a lot of attention. I feel that Jumpman is one of the most underrated games because of this.
It increases your sex appeal! Yes, all you Slashdotters can now have women feel irresistably drawn to your presence! Just set your pager to "chush", give yourself a page when your signifigant-other-to-be is around, and watch what happens;)
You see, all the discussions and news about Napster's fee-based service have all had some form of "crippling" to them. It may have a limited number of downloads, the files may expire after a certain amount of time, forcing you to download again, they may be of limited quality, and they may be a combination of the above. But what is truly heinous is that the new Napster will almost certainly not let you burn the music to a cd. Look me in the eye and tell me that this respects my "fair use" rights. You can't do it, can you? No, no one can, because if I paid for that music, I should be able to make a back up.
Add all these circumstances to the fact that this is a proprietary format that probably won't play in that combo cd-mp3 player I just busted a wad on, and you can bet big money that the format not sitting well with me. I'm all for a subscription-based service that would pay my bucks to the artists I download from and would use an already-established format, but that ideal seems to be a long way ahead of us.
No longer do I need to call tech support and have to talk to a clueless minimum wage paid worker who is just reading off a list of problems and solutions written down. Oh no, now I can get the exact same canned responses from a computer! Yippy skippy, real technical help is now even farther away from the common man:-P
"In 2000, the IDSA used authority provided in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to achieve approximately 3000 "takedowns" of infringing material on the Internet...These efforts are made much less effective without the unrestricted access we currently have to WHOIS data, including contact information regarding domain name registrants."
Oh, that's just peachy. For those of you who might not remember, the IDSA is a cartel similar in function to the RIAA and MPAA, but they act on the behalf on software companies. They have shut down web sites containing rom files of games from the 1980's because of "copyright". These are the idiots who seem to think Nintendo is losing money over copies of Mario 3 "illegally" downloaded over the internet.
Now, I'm not a fan of the RIAA, but at least they have a valid concern-most of their music is still sold! If the IDSA can use Whois to shut down emulation-related websites, I'm all for the option of being "unlisted".
Exactly. Using this kind of logic, if the judge has even once in her entire lifetime made a freudian slip while speaking to the court, she is not "100% competant" and should not be allowed to judge cases.
"If the X-box is the same cost as everything else, has the *same games*, but looks better graphically (plus has a "kooler" sounding name) it'll probably win. If it's 20 buck cheaper, it'll destroy the market. My money's on the X-box no matter who makes it. Survival of the fittest I guess...
Well, then by your logic the Nintendo Gamecube will easily win. The Xbox costs $299, and Sony has no plans to drop the $299 price of the Playstaion 2 by the time Gamecube and Xbox are out. This means you can buy a Gamecube and two games for the price of just a Playstation 2 or Xbox. ($199 for the system and $49 per game).
This is why I'm getting a Gamecube. I'm just a poor boy, Sony doesn't love me;)
Besides the obvious need to have respect for the dead, I feel that Jim Ellis deserves respect because he made the first internet resource that strived to create a community atmosphere. This is the model that the web boards found on many websites were based on, and certainly was an influence on the Slashdot model. Whoever made the sarcastic comment about the graves saying "make money now", I understand you were trying to be funny, but I have a hard time laughing about people who have recently died. It's hardly Jim's fault Usenet has become such a wasteland.
I must not have been paying close attention to all of this. I mean, what exactly did Jackson say about Microsoft? Are judges not allowed to voice their opinions outside of the courtroom?
Last year, ESR was the keynote speaker for MacHack, and his speach alienated the audience. He said the Mac programming culture was elitist because it's "interface obsession" created barriers to entry for new programmers. This statement confused the MacHack attendees because he had previously praised the Mac UI in comparison with Linux and said that standard interface guidelines would strengthen Linux greatly.
In other words, shagoth was trying to say that ESR just didn't understand or identify with the MacHack attendees.
Bah...I could care less about this nonsense. Firstly, he meant Doom had a better 3D engine than Wolfenstein 3D. But that's not the point.
Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were larger leaps for gaming than Quake was in terms of gameplay. I could really care less about what technology is involved or how commercially successful Quake was, these are games we are talking about. With that in mind, Wolfenstein 3D was for many people the first game with a true "you are there" feeling. They didn't care that there weren't any polygons, but they were amazed by the unprecedented feeling of immersion the game had acheived. And Doom had an ungodly creepy and nail-biting atmosphere that was unmatched when it came out. Being critically low on health and not knowing what horrors awaited you on the other side of that door was an unforgettable experinece for me, and Quake failed to live up to that.
Quake quite simply didn't up the ante very much in it's time. Sure it was "REAL 3D", and tons of people bought it, but who cares? Titanic had unprecedented special effects, billions of people saw it, and I still didn't like it. Quake didn't offer a whole lot of new stuff to the FPS genre compared with Quake and Wolfenstein 3D. Screw technology, I judge games by more important criteria.
Oops, I did mess that up, sorry about that. Actually, the very last CRT monitor Apple sold before it ditched them from it's line-up was, IIRC, a 17-inch flatscreen CRT. It debuted alongside the PowerMac G4 Cube, used ADC and replaced the older VGA CRT. And here are the ADC pin-outs in detail, for those who don't want to sort through the other stuff. And yes, I am ashamed that I know all this.
Anyway, if you look at the pin-out diagram, you will see that the cluster of pins on the right is for analog video. Which means that on current Apple monitors, there are some pins not being used...future projects for an adventurous hacker?
The one thing you have to be careful with in recent Apple machines is the monitors. Apple has a new proprietary format called "Apple Display Connector" for their new LCDs that basically combines the power, usb, and video signals into one cable instead of splitting them up like a cat-o-nine tails on the older models. Problem is, this means you can't use new Apple monitors on older Macs, PCs, or even Powerbooks or iBooks without a (surprisingly expensive) adapter. But even worse is the fact that older Apple displays used DVI, and the newer Macs have only ADC and VGA ports, so you need a different kind of adapter for that situation. Fun, huh?
Truth be told, I think ADC is a cool technology, so I think they should get it standardized like they did with Firewire. It would be cool if all monitors could have power, usb, and video signals through one cable.
You, my friend, are exactly right. It seems to me that a place where so many people are in favor of the GPL, which allows you to modify things slightly and then release software that is in a sense "derivative", would understand that writers often "share" plots in a sense.
For that matter, aren't most Slashdotters against software patents? It seems to me that this arguing over plot similarities and owning ideas for stories is analogous to the patenting of software ideas.
Company A:"This database allows you to sort the entries by a user-specified criteria! We have a patent on that!" Slashdot community:"Another company trying to claim ownership of ideas..."
Personally, I think SETI is pointless. And it doesn't hurt me at all that if my machine happens to find the key that I get $2000. I just see it as a way for my existing CPU to potentially help pay for my next one.
Why not be a real altruist and fight cancer with your spare cycles? The United Devices project does what I consider the most useful work of any distributed computing effort:it simulates interactions between thousands of molecules and cancer causing proteins to try to find possible cancer treatments and/or cures. The only real downside to it is that the client is Windows only, which means there is a lot of untapped computing power from other operating systems. Still, I'm disapointed that more people want to look for ET than to fight one of the worst illnesses on our own planet.
(However, in most anime, the animation is done first, with a few mouth openings and closings done when a character would be talking, and they don't worry as much about lipsync. So most anime is "dubbed" into its original language.)
So that's why anime annoys me so much!
I could just never get into anime because the mouths on the characters always bugged the living hell out of me. Even if you watch the original language versions with subtitles, their mouths still don't quite look right. The one thing about this style of animation that I simply cannot stand is the fact that more effort goes into obnoxious special effects than the characters' own lips. When Terry Gilliam animated this way for Monty Python, he realized how insanely funny it was, but a lot of anime fans consider it high art.
Anyway, this will probably got modded down by the Anime-loving Slashdot population, but I just had to get this off my chest.
All right, it's a troll. Sue me, I coudln't resist.
Statistics say:
I go to a college with 100 people. (This is a very tiny college.) Around five will use Macs, and they want to share disks with someone who uses a PC.
My personal experience says:
I have a friend who uses a Mac. He gave me a zip disk once. I had to use special software to open it.
For some reason, I'll bet I'm not the <I>only</I> person in the whole world who has encountered this situation. Besides, this is all beside the point. The argument was that Microsoft doesn't play nice, and the number of people the company isn't nice to doesn't make it irrelevant. They are still people getting the cold shoulder from Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
So that's why the RIAA backed off. Putting on my paranoid geek hat, I'm beginning to wonder: if SDMI had been a success, would they still have gone after him? I think they just might have tried...after all, free speech or no, I can see them arguing that his research threatened the livelihood of thousands of people working for the record companies...or maybe I've just been up too long.
Israel and Palestine continue to have disagreements.
Bill Gates has officially gone on record saying that open-source "promotes ulcers".
The stock market had a disappointing week.
Eric S. Raymond has published his newest essay, "The surprising connections between closed-source software and ingrown toenails".
Richard Stallman has published the definitive list distinguishing between "free", "inexpensive", "costly-but compatible with free", and "immoral" software licenses.
...and finally, a heated argument took place at a college between two students debating the merits of vi and emacs.
I'm working on a website powered by ten hamsters running on excercise wheels. This generates enough power to use my old Commodore 64 to host my upcoming web site. I wonder how they will handle the Slashdot effect?
I once angrily spouted out at a family gathering, "I hate capitalism, but I still want to own my own stuff!" What I didn't realize then is that I actually hated our current system, which technically isn't pure capitalism, or rather, doesn't capture capitalism's ideal of everyone fighting fairly and letting the markets take a logical course of action. Silly me, I used to think logic drove us humans. But what's the alternative? Socialism? Eww.
Jumpman was very innovative for it's day, at least for one thing: the levels weren't static. When you got to certain bombs in certain levels, the terrain would completely reform. This element of surprise was completely ahead of it's time. There were levels where, when you got to a bomb, the world would alternate between one thing being invisible to another, so you were required to pay a lot of attention. I feel that Jumpman is one of the most underrated games because of this.
It increases your sex appeal! Yes, all you Slashdotters can now have women feel irresistably drawn to your presence! Just set your pager to "chush", give yourself a page when your signifigant-other-to-be is around, and watch what happens ;)
You see, all the discussions and news about Napster's fee-based service have all had some form of "crippling" to them. It may have a limited number of downloads, the files may expire after a certain amount of time, forcing you to download again, they may be of limited quality, and they may be a combination of the above. But what is truly heinous is that the new Napster will almost certainly not let you burn the music to a cd. Look me in the eye and tell me that this respects my "fair use" rights. You can't do it, can you? No, no one can, because if I paid for that music, I should be able to make a back up.
Add all these circumstances to the fact that this is a proprietary format that probably won't play in that combo cd-mp3 player I just busted a wad on, and you can bet big money that the format not sitting well with me. I'm all for a subscription-based service that would pay my bucks to the artists I download from and would use an already-established format, but that ideal seems to be a long way ahead of us.
No longer do I need to call tech support and have to talk to a clueless minimum wage paid worker who is just reading off a list of problems and solutions written down. Oh no, now I can get the exact same canned responses from a computer! Yippy skippy, real technical help is now even farther away from the common man :-P
Oh, that's just peachy. For those of you who might not remember, the IDSA is a cartel similar in function to the RIAA and MPAA, but they act on the behalf on software companies. They have shut down web sites containing rom files of games from the 1980's because of "copyright". These are the idiots who seem to think Nintendo is losing money over copies of Mario 3 "illegally" downloaded over the internet.
Now, I'm not a fan of the RIAA, but at least they have a valid concern-most of their music is still sold! If the IDSA can use Whois to shut down emulation-related websites, I'm all for the option of being "unlisted".
Exactly. Using this kind of logic, if the judge has even once in her entire lifetime made a freudian slip while speaking to the court, she is not "100% competant" and should not be allowed to judge cases.
Well, if US price cuts do come, it looks like Microsoft will really be getting the shaft.
Well, the Japan price cut is to $280, according to your link. This means you can still get a Gamecube plus one game for less than a Playstation 2.
Well, then by your logic the Nintendo Gamecube will easily win. The Xbox costs $299, and Sony has no plans to drop the $299 price of the Playstaion 2 by the time Gamecube and Xbox are out. This means you can buy a Gamecube and two games for the price of just a Playstation 2 or Xbox. ($199 for the system and $49 per game).
This is why I'm getting a Gamecube. I'm just a poor boy, Sony doesn't love me ;)
Besides the obvious need to have respect for the dead, I feel that Jim Ellis deserves respect because he made the first internet resource that strived to create a community atmosphere. This is the model that the web boards found on many websites were based on, and certainly was an influence on the Slashdot model. Whoever made the sarcastic comment about the graves saying "make money now", I understand you were trying to be funny, but I have a hard time laughing about people who have recently died. It's hardly Jim's fault Usenet has become such a wasteland.
I must not have been paying close attention to all of this. I mean, what exactly did Jackson say about Microsoft? Are judges not allowed to voice their opinions outside of the courtroom?
In other words, shagoth was trying to say that ESR just didn't understand or identify with the MacHack attendees.
Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were larger leaps for gaming than Quake was in terms of gameplay. I could really care less about what technology is involved or how commercially successful Quake was, these are games we are talking about. With that in mind, Wolfenstein 3D was for many people the first game with a true "you are there" feeling. They didn't care that there weren't any polygons, but they were amazed by the unprecedented feeling of immersion the game had acheived. And Doom had an ungodly creepy and nail-biting atmosphere that was unmatched when it came out. Being critically low on health and not knowing what horrors awaited you on the other side of that door was an unforgettable experinece for me, and Quake failed to live up to that.
Quake quite simply didn't up the ante very much in it's time. Sure it was "REAL 3D", and tons of people bought it, but who cares? Titanic had unprecedented special effects, billions of people saw it, and I still didn't like it. Quake didn't offer a whole lot of new stuff to the FPS genre compared with Quake and Wolfenstein 3D. Screw technology, I judge games by more important criteria.
Anyway, if you look at the pin-out diagram, you will see that the cluster of pins on the right is for analog video. Which means that on current Apple monitors, there are some pins not being used...future projects for an adventurous hacker?
Truth be told, I think ADC is a cool technology, so I think they should get it standardized like they did with Firewire. It would be cool if all monitors could have power, usb, and video signals through one cable.
...or "eat" into his investment.
For that matter, aren't most Slashdotters against software patents? It seems to me that this arguing over plot similarities and owning ideas for stories is analogous to the patenting of software ideas.
Company A:"This database allows you to sort the entries by a user-specified criteria! We have a patent on that!"
Slashdot community:"Another company trying to claim ownership of ideas..."
Why not be a real altruist and fight cancer with your spare cycles? The United Devices project does what I consider the most useful work of any distributed computing effort:it simulates interactions between thousands of molecules and cancer causing proteins to try to find possible cancer treatments and/or cures. The only real downside to it is that the client is Windows only, which means there is a lot of untapped computing power from other operating systems. Still, I'm disapointed that more people want to look for ET than to fight one of the worst illnesses on our own planet.
So that's why anime annoys me so much!
I could just never get into anime because the mouths on the characters always bugged the living hell out of me. Even if you watch the original language versions with subtitles, their mouths still don't quite look right. The one thing about this style of animation that I simply cannot stand is the fact that more effort goes into obnoxious special effects than the characters' own lips. When Terry Gilliam animated this way for Monty Python, he realized how insanely funny it was, but a lot of anime fans consider it high art.
Anyway, this will probably got modded down by the Anime-loving Slashdot population, but I just had to get this off my chest.
All right, it's a troll. Sue me, I coudln't resist.
Statistics say:
I go to a college with 100 people. (This is a very tiny college.) Around five will use Macs, and they want to share disks with someone who uses a PC.
My personal experience says:
I have a friend who uses a Mac. He gave me a zip disk once. I had to use special software to open it.
For some reason, I'll bet I'm not the <I>only</I> person in the whole world who has encountered this situation. Besides, this is all beside the point. The argument was that Microsoft doesn't play nice, and the number of people the company isn't nice to doesn't make it irrelevant. They are still people getting the cold shoulder from Microsoft.