Well, the impression I get from US law, being a US citizen, is this: given some action X, if X is not prohibited by law and I have not legally agreed not to do X, then I can do X without expecting any legal repercussions. It doesn't matter how absurd X sounds; it's still within my rights.
The lawsuit doesn't concern the sale of items, which is against the EULA and therefore totally within Sony/Verant's right to ristrict. Instead, the lawsuit is about players selling their own time. Many eBay auctions for EverQuest items include a disclaimer like "the items named in this auction are the property of Verant and are not for sale. Rather, you are bidding on the time I spent in acquiring the item.". The Sony/Verant-directed removal of these particualr auctions basically means that Sony/Verant is preventing players from hiring other players to acquire items for them on a contractual basis. Since agreement to the EULA does not entail the agreement that Sony/Verant owns your time (which wouldn't go down too well, methinks), the removal of these time auctions might be illegal. It definitely needs the consideration of our judicial system.
The Omnibots were wonderful toys. I actually won one many years ago (I was quite young) at one of those supermarket raffle thingies. At the time, I was obsessed with robots, from Transformers to my more esoteric Lego/Construx creations. The acquisition of the Omnibot is an experience I will always cherish.
The Omnibot had many uses. One memorable application was greeting trick-or-treaters at the door on Halloween. You see, the Omnibot had a very extensive radio remote control. Not only could you move the robot, but you could also press a key on the remote, talk into the remote, and your voice would come out of the Omnibot. To prepare for the fun, I mounted the Omnibot's tray on the robot and piled candy on it. I then hid in the entry hall closet, with the door opened just a crack for visual and oxygen, and proceeded to scare the crap out of all the little kids that came to the door:
KID: Trick or treat, smell my fee--what?!?!
BOT: (moves toward kid) I AM OMNIBOT. TAKE CANDY NOW AND EXIT.
KID: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Mommy!
Now that I think about it, 'programming' my omnibot to travel a certain path and say certain things was the first programming-like experience I ever had. Omnibot, I salute you!
...was myself. If I hadn't taken some personal initiative and discovered computers and the artistry of programming, it is possible that I never would have escaped the rural Oklahoma cesspool in which I spent my first 18 years.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Are you all mad? [minor spoilage]
on
Antitrust
·
· Score: 2
=== Are you all mad? This movie rocked! ===
Ok, ok, Let me elaborate. I went into the theater expecting another Hackers (in fact, I really wanted to see Thirteen Days, but my wife insisted on Antitrust). I came out, however, thoroughly amazed, and I argue that you should be, too. I understand that there were some things about the movie that could have beed done better, but all you naysayers are overlooking several outstandingly positive facts that seem blatantly obvious to me:
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. <ASSHOLE TYPE=POMPOUS>
There was very little 'Hollywoodization' of the computers. It could have been like in The Net, Jurassic Park, or *shudder* even Hackers. There could have been VR gloves, head plugs, and skateboards galore. But no, we had real operating systems. We had prominent featuring of a free Unix. We had a prominent featuring of Gnome (which is great, even for a KDE fan like myself). The hero used a what looked like a real command line. We had real code. We had real code. WE HAD REAL CODE.
The hackers were the heros. With all the assaults on hackers that have been cascading from the media, it sure is nice to see an audiovisual mass communication system showing scenes where the hacker is the hero and the media, law enforcement, and corporations are the bad guys. Someone had some serious cojones to do this...
The open source movement got some very positive, prominent advertising. So what if it was simplistic and inserted somewhat haphazardly into the script. It was open source, it was the good guys, and many everyday people will walk away from the theater with some understanding of what it is (along with a positive bias).
One of the movie's main statements was "knowledge belongs to all the people". Isn't that what many of us on slashdot have been fighting for for?
WE HAD REAL CODE!!!
I'm sorry, but seeing, on a giant movie screen, a Bill Gates lookalike with the words "I AM MURDERING PROGRAMMERS", superimposed and flashing, will be something I will cherish for the rest of my life.
People, this was a movie, made by a move producer and friends. Given the limits on imagination caused by their lack of first-hand knowledge in the programmer's culture, this was an excellent job.
A while ago there was some hubbub in our community regarding the concept unifying the ports trees of the the different BSD flavors. It seems to me that this would be a mostly good thing, reducing duplication of work and making the ports both more plentiful and of a generally higher quality. Has there been any discussion of this in core? If so, does it look like this will ever happen?
If something went wrong on a MOON mission, we would ahve left our astronauts out there to die
True, but only if there were no other solution. Remember Apollo 13 (the mission, not the very good and ultimately enjoyable movie)? NASA and friends did everything in their power to bring the boys home -- when it would have been much less expensive to just turn the radios off, send all the engineers home, and tell the media that they lost contact with the astronauts.
Ok, thanks for the good points in response to my question. I don't think I'll be getting a wireless NIC for my laptop until news like this becomes more commonplace (or I have enough money to put a base station in in my house:)), but I can now definitely see how much more convenient it is for the Starbucks people and the customers.
So I'll have to travel to a Starbucks location to use wireless Internet? Doesn't that kinda miss the point? What advantages, except for easier table-to-table movement, would this provide over just putting ethernet plugs everywhere? I don't think I'll buy into the whole wireless thing until there's more blinkenlights and less vapor.
When someone breaks something, fix the bug, and then roll back the game state to where it was when the bugs were first exploited
I don't think that would go over too well at all. Players invest huge amounts of time on these games building up their characters. Imagine if an exploit existed for a week or more in EverQuest, and they rolled everybody back to their previous status, including the 250,000 players that just had an honest experience and item gain during that time. We wouldn't let Verant hear the end of it, and many of us (me included) would cancel our account.
I don't think any MMORPG maker would implement this if they wanted to stay in business.
I pre-apologize for the use of stereotypes here, but here goes...
I would have to say that having the skills of a good programmer does enable one to have certain skills in traditional languages. I would not say that it works the other way around, though. Being a connoisseur (sp?) of programming languages entails being a master of syntax and semantics. That is, programmers must be intimate with the rules of how to form statements of the language together into programs and with the meanings of each thing that can be expressed in the language. When dealing with traditional languages, the same rules exist, though they are usually a bit more vague and irregular (read: inelegant). So programmers typically are masters of the mechanics of traditional languages. Of course, there is much more to being a linguistically talented than just knowing the mechanical aspects.
Use me for an example. I am a skilled programmer. I took four EASY years of Spanish in high school. My English grades were most likely a school record. However, I have trouble writing things; it takes a really long time and I'm never satisfied with what comes out. I also did very poorly on those "reading comprehension" types of questions where you read something and answer questions about the artistry or hidden meaning of the work. I hate pretty much all classic literature; I read nothing except for a few sci-fi books and programming books.
Anyway, my point is that the artistic side of the study of traditional languages will probably get you nowhere in the programming language world. It's the mastery of the syntax and semantics of language that makes you have the right thought processes for programming.
...is that the target age of the second prequel be about 5 to 10 years greater than the target age of the first prequel. That is, I want more science fiction / fantasy and less cute, cuddly, "wacky!" action characters that were conceived as an eight-year-old's action figure before they were inserted into the plot.
Has anyone else heard rumors to the effect that Jar Jar may have actually been someone else in disguise?
I have been using KDE2 for some time now on my FreeBSD box, and I like it. Although I had to wrestle with kdm to get it working, and konsole still dumps core, the suite is quite decent on the whole -- especially with Konqueror. I've used it to do a bunch of web surfing, and the results are good:
It hasn't crashed on me once
It seems to be faster than Netscape
It seems much less bloated than Netscape
Minimal rendering errors.
What amazes me is that the whole KDE project has gotten 2.0, which represents a relatively gigantic amount of progress over 1.x, together so quickly. Whatever magic they're doing, I hope they keep doing it.
OK, I haven't seen it, it may never even come out here, but are you serious? Paul Atriedies is not Luke Skywalker! He is noble heir, a mentat, trained as a soldier, general, politician, priest and more. He is not your average 15 year old
Relax, it's not that extreme. He's not your average 15-year-old, but he is a 15-year-old. There's just a slight twist of rebelliousness (and aloofness, too) about him compared with the Paul in the original movie, that's all. It's not a total Luke conversion. Indeed, that would be bad.
Personally, I liked the Luke-ish qualities of this miniseries's Paul. It seems to me that a younger person in his position (having his life and essentially, his freedom, taken away by the responsibilities imposed on him by his position in society) would be quite likely to have a somewhat more rebellious outlook on life. At least, I sure would. I like the new Paul.
Doesn't this idea sound like something a Dilbert PHB would say? "Hey, I have an idea! Let's refer to web pages by number instead of by name!", to which the only response is "Must control...raging...fist...of death!".
An encrypted connection to the remote site exists, but is slow and unreliable
So? You're just storing source in the repository, right? Unless it's <= a 9600bps modem, you shouldn't have a problem. Even if your project is huge, only the initial checkouts are going to need that much bandwidth or uptime.
If the connection is so bad that you cannot access your remote repository, then maybe you should think about ways to improve the connection. That would seem like a more elegant approach.
It's like people here
actually believe that they are B-movie nerds, waging an eternal war against jocks
I believe, because I lived though high school as what you call a B-movie nerd, in a town that makes the movie 'Varsity Blues' look benign. The war against the jocks was a very real thing, fueled by pure hatred and a desire for revenge. With the things that were done to me, how could anyone not fight back?
It's all over now, and I'm very pleased with the outcome. I'm making more money now (as a college student even) than 98% of the people in my old home town. As for the people who taught me what hell was like... well, their livelihood now depends on cows. In other words, I won.
Hype or not, I bet we'll see many such stories throughout the next two years or so -- and some of them will be true. Ladies and gentlemen, it appears that the next round in the battle of the consoles has begun. Sony, Nintendo, Microso...PFFT!, Indrema, etc... It will be very interesting to see who lives and who dies.
The X-Box people must feel quite wierd, having to compete and all...
At least they could have left such a change in an advanced dialog box for experienced users
You just haven't looked hard enough. I bet you could fix the problem by using the following steps (and I'm not quite sure about what everything is called, as I don't really have a Windows box with AOL on it nearby, or hell, even a windows box nearby):
Let us assume your comment is true for a bit. Then, it's quite a sad fact that us hippie, amateur coders produce better software than most of the other, truly gifted programmers. What's wrong with them? Why can't they get their act together?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the impression I get from US law, being a US citizen, is this: given some action X, if X is not prohibited by law and I have not legally agreed not to do X, then I can do X without expecting any legal repercussions. It doesn't matter how absurd X sounds; it's still within my rights.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
People, read the damn thing!
The lawsuit doesn't concern the sale of items, which is against the EULA and therefore totally within Sony/Verant's right to ristrict. Instead, the lawsuit is about players selling their own time. Many eBay auctions for EverQuest items include a disclaimer like "the items named in this auction are the property of Verant and are not for sale. Rather, you are bidding on the time I spent in acquiring the item.". The Sony/Verant-directed removal of these particualr auctions basically means that Sony/Verant is preventing players from hiring other players to acquire items for them on a contractual basis. Since agreement to the EULA does not entail the agreement that Sony/Verant owns your time (which wouldn't go down too well, methinks), the removal of these time auctions might be illegal. It definitely needs the consideration of our judicial system.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
I lived in Oklahoma. They weren't that astute. :)
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
as the years wore on and the few remaining bugs were fixed ... the bribe went up
The bribe started out at one cent (for the first bug) and doubles for every new bug, I believe. Now THAT's some trust in your work!
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
The Omnibots were wonderful toys. I actually won one many years ago (I was quite young) at one of those supermarket raffle thingies. At the time, I was obsessed with robots, from Transformers to my more esoteric Lego/Construx creations. The acquisition of the Omnibot is an experience I will always cherish.
The Omnibot had many uses. One memorable application was greeting trick-or-treaters at the door on Halloween. You see, the Omnibot had a very extensive radio remote control. Not only could you move the robot, but you could also press a key on the remote, talk into the remote, and your voice would come out of the Omnibot. To prepare for the fun, I mounted the Omnibot's tray on the robot and piled candy on it. I then hid in the entry hall closet, with the door opened just a crack for visual and oxygen, and proceeded to scare the crap out of all the little kids that came to the door:
KID: Trick or treat, smell my fee--what?!?!
BOT: (moves toward kid) I AM OMNIBOT. TAKE CANDY NOW AND EXIT.
KID: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Mommy!
Now that I think about it, 'programming' my omnibot to travel a certain path and say certain things was the first programming-like experience I ever had. Omnibot, I salute you!
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
...was myself. If I hadn't taken some personal initiative and discovered computers and the artistry of programming, it is possible that I never would have escaped the rural Oklahoma cesspool in which I spent my first 18 years.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
=== Are you all mad? This movie rocked! ===
Ok, ok, Let me elaborate. I went into the theater expecting another Hackers (in fact, I really wanted to see Thirteen Days, but my wife insisted on Antitrust). I came out, however, thoroughly amazed, and I argue that you should be, too. I understand that there were some things about the movie that could have beed done better, but all you naysayers are overlooking several outstandingly positive facts that seem blatantly obvious to me:
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. <ASSHOLE TYPE=POMPOUS>
- There was very little 'Hollywoodization' of the computers. It could have been like in The Net, Jurassic Park, or *shudder* even Hackers. There could have been VR gloves, head plugs, and skateboards galore. But no, we had real operating systems. We had prominent featuring of a free Unix. We had a prominent featuring of Gnome (which is great, even for a KDE fan like myself). The hero used a what looked like a real command line. We had real code. We had real code. WE HAD REAL CODE.
- The hackers were the heros. With all the assaults on hackers that have been cascading from the media, it sure is nice to see an audiovisual mass communication system showing scenes where the hacker is the hero and the media, law enforcement, and corporations are the bad guys. Someone had some serious cojones to do this...
- The open source movement got some very positive, prominent advertising. So what if it was simplistic and inserted somewhat haphazardly into the script. It was open source, it was the good guys, and many everyday people will walk away from the theater with some understanding of what it is (along with a positive bias).
- One of the movie's main statements was "knowledge belongs to all the people". Isn't that what many of us on slashdot have been fighting for for?
- WE HAD REAL CODE!!!
- I'm sorry, but seeing, on a giant movie screen, a Bill Gates lookalike with the words "I AM MURDERING PROGRAMMERS", superimposed and flashing, will be something I will cherish for the rest of my life.
People, this was a movie, made by a move producer and friends. Given the limits on imagination caused by their lack of first-hand knowledge in the programmer's culture, this was an excellent job.--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
A while ago there was some hubbub in our community regarding the concept unifying the ports trees of the the different BSD flavors. It seems to me that this would be a mostly good thing, reducing duplication of work and making the ports both more plentiful and of a generally higher quality. Has there been any discussion of this in core? If so, does it look like this will ever happen?
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
If something went wrong on a MOON mission, we would ahve left our astronauts out there to die
True, but only if there were no other solution. Remember Apollo 13 (the mission, not the very good and ultimately enjoyable movie)? NASA and friends did everything in their power to bring the boys home -- when it would have been much less expensive to just turn the radios off, send all the engineers home, and tell the media that they lost contact with the astronauts.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Wow... I guess space travel has come a long way since I went to sleep last night!
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Ok, thanks for the good points in response to my question. I don't think I'll be getting a wireless NIC for my laptop until news like this becomes more commonplace (or I have enough money to put a base station in in my house :)), but I can now definitely see how much more convenient it is for the Starbucks people and the customers.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Not in Norman, OK. We have a Barnes & Noble Cafe, and that's it.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
So I'll have to travel to a Starbucks location to use wireless Internet? Doesn't that kinda miss the point? What advantages, except for easier table-to-table movement, would this provide over just putting ethernet plugs everywhere? I don't think I'll buy into the whole wireless thing until there's more blinkenlights and less vapor.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
When someone breaks something, fix the bug, and then roll back the game state to where it was when the bugs were first exploited
I don't think that would go over too well at all. Players invest huge amounts of time on these games building up their characters. Imagine if an exploit existed for a week or more in EverQuest, and they rolled everybody back to their previous status, including the 250,000 players that just had an honest experience and item gain during that time. We wouldn't let Verant hear the end of it, and many of us (me included) would cancel our account.
I don't think any MMORPG maker would implement this if they wanted to stay in business.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
I pre-apologize for the use of stereotypes here, but here goes...
I would have to say that having the skills of a good programmer does enable one to have certain skills in traditional languages. I would not say that it works the other way around, though. Being a connoisseur (sp?) of programming languages entails being a master of syntax and semantics. That is, programmers must be intimate with the rules of how to form statements of the language together into programs and with the meanings of each thing that can be expressed in the language. When dealing with traditional languages, the same rules exist, though they are usually a bit more vague and irregular (read: inelegant). So programmers typically are masters of the mechanics of traditional languages. Of course, there is much more to being a linguistically talented than just knowing the mechanical aspects.
Use me for an example. I am a skilled programmer. I took four EASY years of Spanish in high school. My English grades were most likely a school record. However, I have trouble writing things; it takes a really long time and I'm never satisfied with what comes out. I also did very poorly on those "reading comprehension" types of questions where you read something and answer questions about the artistry or hidden meaning of the work. I hate pretty much all classic literature; I read nothing except for a few sci-fi books and programming books.
Anyway, my point is that the artistic side of the study of traditional languages will probably get you nowhere in the programming language world. It's the mastery of the syntax and semantics of language that makes you have the right thought processes for programming.
Of course, all of this is my humble opinion!
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
...is that the target age of the second prequel be about 5 to 10 years greater than the target age of the first prequel. That is, I want more science fiction / fantasy and less cute, cuddly, "wacky!" action characters that were conceived as an eight-year-old's action figure before they were inserted into the plot.
Has anyone else heard rumors to the effect that Jar Jar may have actually been someone else in disguise?
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
- It hasn't crashed on me once
- It seems to be faster than Netscape
- It seems much less bloated than Netscape
- Minimal rendering errors.
What amazes me is that the whole KDE project has gotten 2.0, which represents a relatively gigantic amount of progress over 1.x, together so quickly. Whatever magic they're doing, I hope they keep doing it.--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
OK, I haven't seen it, it may never even come out here, but are you serious? Paul Atriedies is not Luke Skywalker! He is noble heir, a mentat, trained as a soldier, general, politician, priest and more. He is not your average 15 year old
Relax, it's not that extreme. He's not your average 15-year-old, but he is a 15-year-old. There's just a slight twist of rebelliousness (and aloofness, too) about him compared with the Paul in the original movie, that's all. It's not a total Luke conversion. Indeed, that would be bad.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Personally, I liked the Luke-ish qualities of this miniseries's Paul. It seems to me that a younger person in his position (having his life and essentially, his freedom, taken away by the responsibilities imposed on him by his position in society) would be quite likely to have a somewhat more rebellious outlook on life. At least, I sure would. I like the new Paul.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Doesn't this idea sound like something a Dilbert PHB would say? "Hey, I have an idea! Let's refer to web pages by number instead of by name!", to which the only response is "Must control...raging...fist...of death!".
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
An encrypted connection to the remote site exists, but is slow and unreliable
So? You're just storing source in the repository, right? Unless it's <= a 9600bps modem, you shouldn't have a problem. Even if your project is huge, only the initial checkouts are going to need that much bandwidth or uptime.
If the connection is so bad that you cannot access your remote repository, then maybe you should think about ways to improve the connection. That would seem like a more elegant approach.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
It's like people here actually believe that they are B-movie nerds, waging an eternal war against jocks
I believe, because I lived though high school as what you call a B-movie nerd, in a town that makes the movie 'Varsity Blues' look benign. The war against the jocks was a very real thing, fueled by pure hatred and a desire for revenge. With the things that were done to me, how could anyone not fight back?
It's all over now, and I'm very pleased with the outcome. I'm making more money now (as a college student even) than 98% of the people in my old home town. As for the people who taught me what hell was like... well, their livelihood now depends on cows. In other words, I won.
Hype or not, I bet we'll see many such stories throughout the next two years or so -- and some of them will be true. Ladies and gentlemen, it appears that the next round in the battle of the consoles has begun. Sony, Nintendo, Microso...PFFT!, Indrema, etc... It will be very interesting to see who lives and who dies.
The X-Box people must feel quite wierd, having to compete and all...
You just haven't looked hard enough. I bet you could fix the problem by using the following steps (and I'm not quite sure about what everything is called, as I don't really have a Windows box with AOL on it nearby, or hell, even a windows box nearby):
- Open the "Start Menu"
- Choose "Settings"
- Choose "Control Panel"
- Choose "Add/Remove Software"
- Find AOL in the list of software
- Click the "Uninstall" button
I think that will do it.Let us assume your comment is true for a bit. Then, it's quite a sad fact that us hippie, amateur coders produce better software than most of the other, truly gifted programmers. What's wrong with them? Why can't they get their act together?
</SARCASM LEVEL=BITING>