Borland: I think that one will be my hot growth pick fo the second half of this year (I'd buy now but this market SUCKS). The promise of Kylix is already increasing Windows Delphi sales.
I'd like to know how you know this? I mean, it makes sense to me and I don't doubt you, but I'm just curious as to what your source is...
"You know, you use that word a lot, but I don't think it means what you think it means..."
How about forcing people to make innovative *standards* that others can use and prosper from just as easily as you can? That is, after all, how the Internet came about. TCP/IP was very innovative, POP3/SMTP/HTTP/DNS too, Unix socket i/o, and yes, even Linux are all very innovative products. They're also very pervasive products as well, although this has as much to do with the fact that it's an *open innovation* than it does with the innovative nature of it...
Micrsoft and its cronies love to use this 'innovate' word, but I don't think it means what they think it means. Maybe they're using MS Dictionary 1.0, I dunno.
... of intellectual freedom. Anyone who's been to one can tell you that they're a pitiful excuse for intellectual exercise, mired down in the rigors of status quo intelligentsia and bureaucratic wrangling of science.
The truth of the matter is, the *INTERNET* is the last stronghold of intellectual freedom. Or, more accurately, its the *FIRST* stronghold of intellectual freedom, and that's why its so fucking cool.
So it hardly suprises me that Oxford bent to the will of the MPAA. As it has always been doing, pandering to the whims of the uberclass, which, in america, is now represented by corporations - as opposed to england, where it was all land barons and drunk kings.
One thing you can't really do with hardware layering and mixdown is provide a feeling of space - with this screen you can move your head ever so slightly and get a concept of depth, even if its only minor.
This could have exciting implications for future GUI design, and if they perfect the manufacturing process to the point where more than 2 planes can be sandwiched (say, 32 or 64?) then we start seeing some really interesting opportunities for GUI design, not to mention the artistic value, which is often inappropriately overlooked in technology.
Imagine a GUI that gives you a degree of depth inherently without requiring large resources - buttons could have 3d edges that were handled at the hardware level, rather than software - thus making for better resource management, and therefore leading to more efficient GUI performance. This may seem minor, and perhaps it is, but I can see how this would have potential.
Once we get up to the 64-pixel Z-plane level of production, I can see widgets being designed that use the Z-plane to provide ancilliary info feedback to the user without requiring any more interaction on the users part than to just move their head and look closer.
I was thinking about this similar "liveliness" aspect of GUI design the other day when playing with http://www.praystation.com/ (excellent web page) - it'd be nice if there were some way to produce a screen that could figure out what you were looking at, perhaps by bouncing something off your retina and doing geometry to get a point of what you're looking at. In the 80's, marketing devices that used lasers to see what you were looking at were used to do market research of TV commercials - it'd be nice to see something like this built into LCD screens, so we could do away with the mouse altogether.
But the thought I had was that, with something like this, the longer you look at the control the more information it could provide you - bringing a "liveliness" aspect to the control that we don't currently have with the static 2d shapes we call user interfaces right now.
Having a 3D screen with a 64-layer Z-plane would be another way to add 'liveliness' to an interface... you could for example build a mixing console that provides you with channel insert information, with amplituded represented in depth.
I'd say 64-layer Z-planes would be the next major step for this company. Get things to that point, and the GUI design world starts to get *really* interesting...
... which is that, with Linux, they can distribute their games *with their own operating system*.
In other words, Game Developers don't have to be tied to the limitations of Windows any more. They can make their *OWN* standard Linux distro that is fully tuned to their specifications, performs the way they want to, and has only those features that they need to make their game run as *BEST* as possible.
This was one of the reasons that DOS lasted so long as a games platform - because it gave most developers a direct wire straight to the hardware, which was a very significant requirement for many game companies.
And now, with bootable CD-ROM drives more and more prevalent (wasn't always this way, you know...) there's functionally nothing stopping the average Game Developer Corp from making a one-CD game that boots on the PC, bypassing Windows entirely, and which gets the utmost best performance possible from the target hardware.
I foresee a day when it won't matter what operating system you've got *installed* on your PC - as a user, you shouldn't *HAVE* to worry about this (and Microsoft know this, as do Sega, Sony, and Nintendo) - you just put your CD in the PC, kick back, wait for it to boot and away it goes... just like consoles have been able to do for years.
Sure, there are some issues such as driver support, yeah. But these are being taken care of, and the advantages to the Developer for being able to *fully* control the operating system underlying their game code far outweigh the disadvantages, imho.
(On a side note, I seem to recall there being an effort at creating a "game only" Linux distribution that can be burned to CD-ROM, and which includes all the latest and greatest drivers for video cards... but I don't remember the URL.)
I remember demo'ing Intellidraw once, a long time ago, and making plans to purchase it - but I got distracted by Viso and Illustrator (which I currently use as a diagram tool, even though its totally yucky to do this)...
So do you know if there are any older versions of Intellidraw available anywhere, for sale even?
MS dropped the ball. I told them to make this thing appear as an interim step. "
... make "Russ" seem as arrogant as fuck.
Sure, he might be qualified to scrutinize MS' security (hell, it doesn't take much to be in a position where you can poke strong technical holes in MS' security, sheesh), and he may very well have some good points to make, but coming off like "I told them so, but they didn't listen" is really just fundamental geek arrogance at its finest.
The *viewpoint* may be perfectly valid, but the arrogant header containing the packet is going to cause this message to bounce off corporate-mindset firewalls all over the place.
Who the hell does he think he is? The Great God of Microsoft, directing his minions? I thought that position was already filled.
With all due respect, I do *not* know this Russ person at all, and may be treading on a few toes, but since I don't know him, his viewpoint wrapped in arrogance is an unfortunate first intro. (I'm sure he's a technically competent invididual, though.)
This is a perfect example for how *not* to communicate to an industry/public about technology. Better would be to just state the facts, and leave the blame out of the equation - it'll carry better in mainstream media, because media types detest geek arrogance, especially when it involves Microsoft...
Keep one hand on the keyboard, and one hand on the mouse.
And as such, it kicks serious ass. Yes, it is confusing initially, and yes, it is frustrating if you've been weaned on the fat of other GUI's, but trust me: get the tutorial, spend an hour doing it, and you will have an epiphany about Blender.
I'd be very surprised if, after learning the interface (buy the book! support NaN! Get the tutorial CD!), you do *not* become a Blender GUI Zealot, such as I find myself becoming more and more these days...
BTW, this is off topic, but I caught up with the Blender team at E3 over the weekend - great bunch of guys! They were handing out free CD's with Blender and the tutorial guide, and I have to say - I think these guys are a great example of how Free Software can work.
Otherwise you give investigators a clue as to when messages were sent in the *real* world - this can be important when creating an evidence trail for conviction. Being able to say that "the dummy packets sent out between X and Y dates contained the secret info" is one step closer to having evidence - so throw out the time factor and it reduces the investigative trail as well.
Also, a scheduled send permits calculated intercepts. If you're going to all this trouble to fight a war on your own rights to private communication, there is no point giving your enemy any information at all - and a simple "dummy messages goes out at 5pm" gives the opportunity for other tactics.
If you're worried about bandwidth, then just do random sends/receives of the dummy data, albeit on a more persistent basis.
Most peoples/etc/passwd or/etc/httpd/httpd.conf wouldn't take very long to transfer this way...
I like the idea of spoofing packets out to the net with retaddr set to target. That's pretty damned interesting, actually... the more I think about it, the more fun it is!;)
If it's a simple matter of making MSSQL work with Postgres' (or some other databases) SQL implementation, this shouldn't be *too* tricky.
Maybe it's possible, who knows? The point is, you can't get any help unless you put the SQL out there for someone to have a look at it. If that doesn't violate the license, of course, but hey - they wouldn't have given you the SQL source unless they expected you to be able to do stuff with it...
Things like this will just force more expansion on the FreeNET front.
This is a losing battle - the only thing that RIAA can even remotely *hope* to gain is a public perception that they'll beat you if you try to usurp their members positions as owners and dominators of the media industry.
FreeNET will come along and fuck this up for them, big time. It'll also be a major headache for *legitimate* law enforcement, but I suspect the Discordians behind the various free net movements find that perfectly reasonable.
I just hope that *real* musicians, who *want* to share their works with others keep in mind that they *STILL CAN DO IT, IN SPITE OF WHAT THE RIAA/MPAA SAY ABOUT IT*.
Folks, there's an awful lot of good music out there, for free, available to download any time of day. You don't *have* to buy the force-fed 'product' that's being pushed in the frontlines - you can always have a more direct, personal relationship with other musicians whose art you prefer.
When was the last time you sent an email to Christina Aguilera or Metallica and got a *real* response, eh? That's the new rules of the game, and the majors know they can't play that.
There are plenty of translator programs available for the Palm platform nowadays, and the investment in Palm hardware is better than in a dedicated translator machine.
Check all the usual Palm websites (I don't know 'em off the top of my head), and you'll see what I mean.
Palms are the veritable sonic screwdriver of computing. Just pick up a cheap one, buy the translator software, and leave it at that.
(Might I suggest a Visor? http://www.handspring.com/)
Put Bleem CD in, boot it. Bleem plays nice little tune, tells you to put your other CD in there, you do it. Away you go.
Though I dunno if we're totally understanding this Bleem/DC concept. It'd be *cool* to be able to play PSX games on the Dreamcast with Bleem, but I think it's more likely that Bleem are doing a DC emulator of their own, a la Bleem PSX.
Still, if we do get Bleem for the DC (instead of Bleem *of* the DC), that'd give me more console space in my game system - I could sell the PSX, keep the PSX CD's for use with Bleem on my DC while I wait to add a PSX2 in the meantime.
It'd be great to see this sort of 'cooperation' between console giants, heh heh...
... like the attention span of the generation after you sucks. And after all, these are the ones that Sega are going to be targeting.
(I'm not saying your attention span doesn't suck, btw. It probably just doesn't suck as much as Generation X2.0, though...)
Sega will probably make, on average, about $10 per game, per user on this system, and it won't be coming from rational, attention-span-of-an-old-gnat types like you or I...
The RIAA could feasibly ask for huge damages on this. 80,000 albums worth of profit is a *lot* of money, and its not inconceivable that they could prove they 'lost profit' from this action by MP3.COM.
It ain't over yet, anyway, but this is a case to keep a close eye on.
Certainly yours is one of the better explanations for what the case is here for the RIAA's success, thanks for clearing that up.
So in effect, the fact that my.mp3.com made some money from distributing their fair-use backups of copyrighted material (indirectly - advertising/banner revenues mostly, I would assume) is where they violated the law.
In that case, MP3.COM broke the law. It's not necessarily a favourite law, but they broke it nevertheless.
Will be interesting to see this one go through the appeals process... I wonder if MP3.COM had *any* plans for how to handle this sort of stuff at all? I think this has the potential to bankrupt them.
Slashdot Mirror
Borland: I think that one will be my hot growth pick fo the second half of this year (I'd buy now but this market SUCKS). The promise of Kylix is already increasing Windows Delphi sales.
I'd like to know how you know this? I mean, it makes sense to me and I don't doubt you, but I'm just curious as to what your source is...
"You know, you use that word a lot, but I don't think it means what you think it means ..."
How about forcing people to make innovative *standards* that others can use and prosper from just as easily as you can? That is, after all, how the Internet came about. TCP/IP was very innovative, POP3/SMTP/HTTP/DNS too, Unix socket i/o, and yes, even Linux are all very innovative products. They're also very pervasive products as well, although this has as much to do with the fact that it's an *open innovation* than it does with the innovative nature of it...
Micrsoft and its cronies love to use this 'innovate' word, but I don't think it means what they think it means. Maybe they're using MS Dictionary 1.0, I dunno.
... of intellectual freedom. Anyone who's been to one can tell you that they're a pitiful excuse for intellectual exercise, mired down in the rigors of status quo intelligentsia and bureaucratic wrangling of science.
The truth of the matter is, the *INTERNET* is the last stronghold of intellectual freedom. Or, more accurately, its the *FIRST* stronghold of intellectual freedom, and that's why its so fucking cool.
So it hardly suprises me that Oxford bent to the will of the MPAA. As it has always been doing, pandering to the whims of the uberclass, which, in america, is now represented by corporations - as opposed to england, where it was all land barons and drunk kings.
One thing you can't really do with hardware layering and mixdown is provide a feeling of space - with this screen you can move your head ever so slightly and get a concept of depth, even if its only minor.
This could have exciting implications for future GUI design, and if they perfect the manufacturing process to the point where more than 2 planes can be sandwiched (say, 32 or 64?) then we start seeing some really interesting opportunities for GUI design, not to mention the artistic value, which is often inappropriately overlooked in technology.
Imagine a GUI that gives you a degree of depth inherently without requiring large resources - buttons could have 3d edges that were handled at the hardware level, rather than software - thus making for better resource management, and therefore leading to more efficient GUI performance. This may seem minor, and perhaps it is, but I can see how this would have potential.
Once we get up to the 64-pixel Z-plane level of production, I can see widgets being designed that use the Z-plane to provide ancilliary info feedback to the user without requiring any more interaction on the users part than to just move their head and look closer.
I was thinking about this similar "liveliness" aspect of GUI design the other day when playing with http://www.praystation.com/ (excellent web page) - it'd be nice if there were some way to produce a screen that could figure out what you were looking at, perhaps by bouncing something off your retina and doing geometry to get a point of what you're looking at. In the 80's, marketing devices that used lasers to see what you were looking at were used to do market research of TV commercials - it'd be nice to see something like this built into LCD screens, so we could do away with the mouse altogether.
But the thought I had was that, with something like this, the longer you look at the control the more information it could provide you - bringing a "liveliness" aspect to the control that we don't currently have with the static 2d shapes we call user interfaces right now.
Having a 3D screen with a 64-layer Z-plane would be another way to add 'liveliness' to an interface... you could for example build a mixing console that provides you with channel insert information, with amplituded represented in depth.
I'd say 64-layer Z-planes would be the next major step for this company. Get things to that point, and the GUI design world starts to get *really* interesting...
Microsoft won't answer those questions.
This is just laywerease for "fuck off, we're not going to do what you asked us to do".
They could doctor the framerate - render each image separately, render it out to video, play it back at video speeds.
Etc.
Anyway, sorry to pop your bubble dude, but you shouldn't trust all the video's you see at a game conference...
Oh, and you've never heard of game companies doctoring video's of gameplay for a conference?
In that case, I've got an integrated browser/operating system I want to sell you...
It wasn't realtime, it was a video.
... which is that, with Linux, they can distribute their games *with their own operating system*.
In other words, Game Developers don't have to be tied to the limitations of Windows any more. They can make their *OWN* standard Linux distro that is fully tuned to their specifications, performs the way they want to, and has only those features that they need to make their game run as *BEST* as possible.
This was one of the reasons that DOS lasted so long as a games platform - because it gave most developers a direct wire straight to the hardware, which was a very significant requirement for many game companies.
And now, with bootable CD-ROM drives more and more prevalent (wasn't always this way, you know...) there's functionally nothing stopping the average Game Developer Corp from making a one-CD game that boots on the PC, bypassing Windows entirely, and which gets the utmost best performance possible from the target hardware.
I foresee a day when it won't matter what operating system you've got *installed* on your PC - as a user, you shouldn't *HAVE* to worry about this (and Microsoft know this, as do Sega, Sony, and Nintendo) - you just put your CD in the PC, kick back, wait for it to boot and away it goes... just like consoles have been able to do for years.
Sure, there are some issues such as driver support, yeah. But these are being taken care of, and the advantages to the Developer for being able to *fully* control the operating system underlying their game code far outweigh the disadvantages, imho.
(On a side note, I seem to recall there being an effort at creating a "game only" Linux distribution that can be burned to CD-ROM, and which includes all the latest and greatest drivers for video cards... but I don't remember the URL.)
Are you referring to?
More of that kind of news please! Hot geek chicks, naked, yum!
:)
I remember demo'ing Intellidraw once, a long time ago, and making plans to purchase it - but I got distracted by Viso and Illustrator (which I currently use as a diagram tool, even though its totally yucky to do this)...
So do you know if there are any older versions of Intellidraw available anywhere, for sale even?
Statements such as this:
"Conclusion:
MS dropped the ball. I told them to make this thing appear as an interim step. "
... make "Russ" seem as arrogant as fuck.
Sure, he might be qualified to scrutinize MS' security (hell, it doesn't take much to be in a position where you can poke strong technical holes in MS' security, sheesh), and he may very well have some good points to make, but coming off like "I told them so, but they didn't listen" is really just fundamental geek arrogance at its finest.
The *viewpoint* may be perfectly valid, but the arrogant header containing the packet is going to cause this message to bounce off corporate-mindset firewalls all over the place.
Who the hell does he think he is? The Great God of Microsoft, directing his minions? I thought that position was already filled.
With all due respect, I do *not* know this Russ person at all, and may be treading on a few toes, but since I don't know him, his viewpoint wrapped in arrogance is an unfortunate first intro. (I'm sure he's a technically competent invididual, though.)
This is a perfect example for how *not* to communicate to an industry/public about technology. Better would be to just state the facts, and leave the blame out of the equation - it'll carry better in mainstream media, because media types detest geek arrogance, especially when it involves Microsoft...
It is based on this law:
Keep one hand on the keyboard, and one hand on the mouse.
And as such, it kicks serious ass. Yes, it is confusing initially, and yes, it is frustrating if you've been weaned on the fat of other GUI's, but trust me: get the tutorial, spend an hour doing it, and you will have an epiphany about Blender.
I'd be very surprised if, after learning the interface (buy the book! support NaN! Get the tutorial CD!), you do *not* become a Blender GUI Zealot, such as I find myself becoming more and more these days...
BTW, this is off topic, but I caught up with the Blender team at E3 over the weekend - great bunch of guys! They were handing out free CD's with Blender and the tutorial guide, and I have to say - I think these guys are a great example of how Free Software can work.
Just keep sending it out, constantly.
Otherwise you give investigators a clue as to when messages were sent in the *real* world - this can be important when creating an evidence trail for conviction. Being able to say that "the dummy packets sent out between X and Y dates contained the secret info" is one step closer to having evidence - so throw out the time factor and it reduces the investigative trail as well.
Also, a scheduled send permits calculated intercepts. If you're going to all this trouble to fight a war on your own rights to private communication, there is no point giving your enemy any information at all - and a simple "dummy messages goes out at 5pm" gives the opportunity for other tactics.
If you're worried about bandwidth, then just do random sends/receives of the dummy data, albeit on a more persistent basis.
Most peoples /etc/passwd or /etc/httpd/httpd.conf wouldn't take very long to transfer this way...
;)
I like the idea of spoofing packets out to the net with retaddr set to target. That's pretty damned interesting, actually... the more I think about it, the more fun it is!
If it's a simple matter of making MSSQL work with Postgres' (or some other databases) SQL implementation, this shouldn't be *too* tricky.
Maybe it's possible, who knows? The point is, you can't get any help unless you put the SQL out there for someone to have a look at it. If that doesn't violate the license, of course, but hey - they wouldn't have given you the SQL source unless they expected you to be able to do stuff with it...
Things like this will just force more expansion on the FreeNET front.
This is a losing battle - the only thing that RIAA can even remotely *hope* to gain is a public perception that they'll beat you if you try to usurp their members positions as owners and dominators of the media industry.
FreeNET will come along and fuck this up for them, big time. It'll also be a major headache for *legitimate* law enforcement, but I suspect the Discordians behind the various free net movements find that perfectly reasonable.
I just hope that *real* musicians, who *want* to share their works with others keep in mind that they *STILL CAN DO IT, IN SPITE OF WHAT THE RIAA/MPAA SAY ABOUT IT*.
Folks, there's an awful lot of good music out there, for free, available to download any time of day. You don't *have* to buy the force-fed 'product' that's being pushed in the frontlines - you can always have a more direct, personal relationship with other musicians whose art you prefer.
When was the last time you sent an email to Christina Aguilera or Metallica and got a *real* response, eh? That's the new rules of the game, and the majors know they can't play that.
There are plenty of translator programs available for the Palm platform nowadays, and the investment in Palm hardware is better than in a dedicated translator machine.
Check all the usual Palm websites (I don't know 'em off the top of my head), and you'll see what I mean.
Palms are the veritable sonic screwdriver of computing. Just pick up a cheap one, buy the translator software, and leave it at that.
(Might I suggest a Visor? http://www.handspring.com/)
Put Bleem CD in, boot it. Bleem plays nice little tune, tells you to put your other CD in there, you do it. Away you go.
...
Though I dunno if we're totally understanding this Bleem/DC concept. It'd be *cool* to be able to play PSX games on the Dreamcast with Bleem, but I think it's more likely that Bleem are doing a DC emulator of their own, a la Bleem PSX.
Still, if we do get Bleem for the DC (instead of Bleem *of* the DC), that'd give me more console space in my game system - I could sell the PSX, keep the PSX CD's for use with Bleem on my DC while I wait to add a PSX2 in the meantime.
It'd be great to see this sort of 'cooperation' between console giants, heh heh
... like the attention span of the generation after you sucks. And after all, these are the ones that Sega are going to be targeting.
...
(I'm not saying your attention span doesn't suck, btw. It probably just doesn't suck as much as Generation X2.0, though...)
Sega will probably make, on average, about $10 per game, per user on this system, and it won't be coming from rational, attention-span-of-an-old-gnat types like you or I
I have to wonder how long it will be before services like ZeroPaid, which are clearly controversial in nature, become sponsored promotional sites.
"This anti-pedo web site brought to you by Nike, because only we know how to properly abuse children in factory conditions!"
"This stack dump brought to you by Microsoft Corporation. Where do you want to go now?"
Heh heh... I can totally see that happening.
The RIAA could feasibly ask for huge damages on this. 80,000 albums worth of profit is a *lot* of money, and its not inconceivable that they could prove they 'lost profit' from this action by MP3.COM.
It ain't over yet, anyway, but this is a case to keep a close eye on.
Certainly yours is one of the better explanations for what the case is here for the RIAA's success, thanks for clearing that up.
So in effect, the fact that my.mp3.com made some money from distributing their fair-use backups of copyrighted material (indirectly - advertising/banner revenues mostly, I would assume) is where they violated the law.
In that case, MP3.COM broke the law. It's not necessarily a favourite law, but they broke it nevertheless.
Will be interesting to see this one go through the appeals process... I wonder if MP3.COM had *any* plans for how to handle this sort of stuff at all? I think this has the potential to bankrupt them.