The article is sadly biased against the geek culture. I really hope/. refrains in the future from using culturally loaded terminology which no geek will ever have had the opportunity to become familiar. The amount of jargon I had to wade through was simply horrific.
I've put together a few links to help fellow geeks make more sense of the article. Call it a jargon file. Feel free to contribute.
Illwinter have accomplished something very much in spirit of what this discussion is about with their Dominions game. This game works on Windows, Linux, Solaris, IRIX, and HP-UX.
Wasn't too difficult either, mind you.
All you have to do is have different executables for each platform that all work off the same graphics, sound, level, etc. files. Given the current state of the gaming scene, it's most likely that the bulk of development is done on the accompanying graphics and audio files, complex game engines notwithstanding.
The New York raid caught a relatively small fish in its net. Police said they confiscated two computer towers, 15 DVD burners, 1,208 copies of pirate DVDs and about $5,200 in cash. Only one person was arrested.
Boy... some people just have it all, don't they.
Re:Only because you're a hypersensitive twit.
on
Chase the Rabbits
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
And as for Israelis slaughtering Palestinians, I'd call the last, oh, 96 hours or so in Israel a pretty good indication of who the aggressors are. While one side attempts to negotiate in good faith, the other side is setting of suicide bombs in public places. Who's the good guy to you?
Let me join you in karma burning. I think this post is worth the trouble.
First, my bias to give you something to guage by: I'm half Arab half Scandinavian; lived half my life in the middle east, and I do now.
A few points:
1. You have no grasp of the facts on the ground. I do. Please read up on history first and seek the other side's bias first to better draw your own conclusions.
2. Your world view is a little too simplistic to be constructive. There are only good guys and bad guys in elementary school and Hollywood. The peace process gets derailed every time someone starts looking for 'good guys' and 'bad guys'.
3. Slashdot works better when we keep the politics out of it. Or, at least, the misinformed politics. Your post surprised me because I was under the impression that most shashdotters take the trouble to verify what the mainstream media has to say about issues.
Someone mentioned elite, etc. Yes, there was 3D graphics before there were dedicated processors on PCI/AGP cards for this purpose. Going by this ethos, shouldn't we also be celebrating the modularization of the sound support and serial line comms support functions of the modern PCs? Why is the birthday of the 3D card celebrated, and not the ISA/PCI/USB modem, or sound card? Or perhaps Mac users should celebrate the day the monitor was split off the case.
Any processor intensive application will spawn modular add-ons to take some of the burden off the CPU. So long as the task itself, of course, is generic enough to have a sufficiently large market. Basic economics.
By saying there was no proper 3D graphics before the advent of the accelerators, you are doing a great injustice to the demo scene as it was back then. Remember the 256 byte competitions? The 1 kb and 4 kb competitions? Now here were people who knew how to milk code for every iota of juice that was there. The (almost) forgotten art of Code Optimisation.
Heck, there was 3D graphics on my old Commodore 128; I still have Elite. What do you call the original Battlezone? The only difference was, there wasn't any specialised add-on card to do this task on the market back then.
I don't mean to disrespect current makers, researchers, coders, and gamers. I just think there's got to be many more significant birthdays to commemorate.
How about a feature on the demo scene on slashdot? The younger crowd will appreciate the demos, and we'll get these funny comments from the war-torn 386 vets about how they used to make their own transistors out of sand...
I was a little disappointed by the article; I've tried Mandrake, RedHat, and Debian but my current system is one I built from ground up from source. There's a lot of lip-service paid to the merits of really learning linux and its internals, through things like the Power-up to Bash prompt HOWTO, but I don't see many people actually doing it.
I've only been using linux since December, but I think building my own system has taught me a thing or three that someone who has used, for example Mandrake for a few years wouldn't know.
There's much to be said for learning by doing. I was expecting a little more than a listing of ready-made distros.
People have been predicting that it will take a dumbing down of some sort for linux to become a viable alternative on the desktop. Is this it?
You're correct in criticising their business model; it's not working and it needs overhaul.
This does not mean, however, that these people should not be getting any money from you or I; reading the comments posted on this issue, I see a lot of people who interpret the 'free' part in 'free software' as meaning 'free of a price tag' rather than the proper 'free to do with as you wish' interpretation.
Mandrake's people need to eat just like you and I, and bread costs money, unlike the software they produce.
What we need here is alternative support methods. It's really unfair to a coder to call feeding him/her 'charity'.
Individual open source contributors have no means of receiving dues in any manner for their work. One possible way to set up a support model for these great people is actually through companies like Mandrake which, if you like, acts as a commercial shell to the coders employed in the name of open software within. Think of it as an uber-geek version of the socialist collective.
If Mandrake really wants to render the free software movement a service, it has a golden opportunity to do this now; thrash out a new business model, feed your people, and show us how you can keep open source contributors sheltered, fed, happy, and free.
> Then they must use some hybrid approach: human editors and AI
Well, there's the implied assumption here that the people running this surveillance operate with standard hardware, where standard means something google, altavista, lycos, etc. can get their hands on. Sketchy information suggests that they do not; specialised hardware seems to be the order of the day.
Besides, there's a lot of research going on in terms of context recognition, here to name one place.
I missed the forum thanks to work; there's one idea that had crossed my mind. I acknowledge that/. needs cash flow to keep moving, but there may be a way out of subscriptions.
Set up polls to gather non-personal data for marketroids, such as what compiler you use and why, what http server you use and why, etc. I'm cerrtain that with some small measure of headscratching, it would be possible to gather information about the geek community to be worth money to a marketing research concern while at the same time keeping it within geek sensibilities, i.e. no 'what is your bank account number' type questions.
Perhaaps some form of questionnaire to be filled out upon registration, retroactively applicable?
Study us; we're geeks. We buy stuff. Expensive stuff. Servers. Networking gear. We're the bleeding edge consumers, what the marketing people call 'early adopters'.
I got to the part where this man said something to the effect that professional UI designers can do the job better than amateur users and got the willies. That sounded just like a spate of management consultants I know.
With management consultants, if they can get you to believe they're smarter than you and can help you out, they got themselves a job. If you work out for yourself that 'Hey, this is my operation, I'm sure I know it better than a guy who cracks the management textbooks a couple of times a week' then these guys are out of a job.
This is quite the same; if all of a sudden we discovered that users actually knew more about what they want their individual interfaces to look like than the professional designers, guess who would be the first person in line at the employment office? That's right. UI designers such as Mr. Raskin.
This post is not a judgment of whether Mr. Raskin knows better than Joe Sixpack; it is mrerly to point out that this man is not qualified to state his opinion so long as he can't remain objective.
He's fighting for his bread and butter, after all.
I've been here long enough to know that this thread is going to devolve faster than you can say TinyX into the only real challenger to the vim/emacs war; the Linux on the desktop debate.
To save time, we should just symlink to the earlier desktop discussions. Here ya go.
I'm just sitting here wondering why we seek the acceptance of Joe Sixpack.
There's been a lot of admittedly amusing derisory commentary in the posts here concerning this idea, but the idea itself I think has potential if approached properly.
By properly, I mean without neglect for the fun factor, and without neglect for the incidentally gained knowledge and problem-solving skills potential.
I am in management at a fairly large manufacturing firm, and one of the things we suffer from is sub-standard engineer caliber. This is a by-product of the low-grade education systems in this country (in the 3rd world, btw) as is the lack of any real quantifiable work ethic. Sorry to be blunt, but those are the facts I face daily.
I envision a game simulating the production process from raw materials to finished goods, perhaps with a tutorial intro, where the player comes up against all sorts of defects and has to manipulate the production line accorsingly. Your score is based on the traditional standards of defect rates, rework rates, etc. and the scores are stored online, publicly viewable. Given that we have 12 production lines, there could even be a multi-player option.
It's the gaming competitive drive here that will drive people to play, and if the game is properly simulated they _will_ learn.
Let's put this another way, a more significant way perhaps; if someone were to code this game I just described, we would buy it without so much as blinking. I am the decision-maker there, I know what I'm talking about.
It concerns itself mainly with applications, but the concepts are there.
As an afterthought, one tihng I really liked was on the bbc site; there's a link to a low-graphics version, or was that a text only one, I forget. If you want real elegant design, make the content independent of the HTML and generate the page dynamically based on client capability and preference.
Now this is how to go about it. You build the voice synthesis and lie detection stuff into the DVD drive or whatever other kind of device you want to make safe for Joe Public.
Then you put instructions in the manual explaining how to hook up the electrical cable to the main power grid. This should be arranged so that the other end goes into the drive.
It should work like this, Mr. Mogul:
(User inserts DVD and begins to copy it) (Voice Synthesis Package): "I have detected a disc being copied. Is this for personal backup or piracy purposes?" (User): "Umm. Backup, of course."
The device should now parse the response in its lie detection module. Failure in this step means we proceed to the final step:
(Device closes the circuit between the main power grid and the Pentium IV tower.)
This way, the device won't be hacked Mr. Mogul, since you're basically killing off would-be libertarians.
Hope this helps, Mr. Music Mogul. I couldn't think of anything else that would keep your copy protection schemes from being hacked.
I for one fail to see why giving a game out for free can make copyright enforcement harder. Just so I don't get moderated back into my fat32 partition, let me illustrate. I have a copy of Borland C++ 4.51 licensed for personal use which I got off a PC Plus coverdisc. It is fully functional and nominally free, if you forget about the magazine they stuck on it. This act has not diminished Borland's ability to enforce their copyright. I think Mr. Will Wright of Maxis has a somewhat limited understanding of licensing options.
I reluctantly must admit I see how abandonware might very well infringe on the developers' rights. When you retain copyright for a game that was last sold 8 years ago, you technically reserve for yourself the option of re-introducing it. Distribution under abandonware terms means losing this option.
And I disagree respectfully with those who consider this issue related to the length of copyright enforcement; there is no link. If a certain medium can only be copyright-enforced for 6 months, there will still be illegal duplication of that medium within those 6 months. The issue here is not whether 10 years is enough or not; the issue is the legal status of abandonware. And as far as that's concerned, I think the law is most unfortunately clear.
The question now is how to reconcile the legitimate claims of abandonware maintainers/users with the legal rights of copyright holders?
Developers and publishers, IMHO, must begin to consider the promotional potential of that abandoned software. LSL 1, released for free with a few ads in it for LSL42, will never cannibalise the sales of LSL42. We are beginning to see a lot of this happening with magazine cover disks. It's called promotional material, Mr. Publisher.
Legislation can, should, and traditionally has regulated the actions of people. This is how we send murderers to prison.
Well thought out legislation should also regulate intent where it is blatantly obvious that this will lead to action. This is how people get sentenced for conspiracy to commit murder.
Regulation, however, cannot and should not regulate the mental process leading up to either intent or action; this is the thought police straight out of 1984. The notion that thinking certain things can be dangerous to either you or your society.
Regulate this and you've violated every man and woman's right to see all the facts and make the right choice.
Since when did legislation become involved in the average citizen's ability to distinguish between good and bad?
Slashdot Mirror
The article is sadly biased against the geek culture. I really hope /. refrains in the future from using culturally loaded terminology which no geek will ever have had the opportunity to become familiar. The amount of jargon I had to wade through was simply horrific.
I've put together a few links to help fellow geeks make more sense of the article. Call it a jargon file. Feel free to contribute.
sex
girl
wife
Hope this helps. Try reading the article again now.
I think I have a good notion what that would look like. And I think some other people have had the same notion...
One step closer to a working light saber. Thank you Harvard!
Illwinter have accomplished something very much in spirit of what this discussion is about with their Dominions game. This game works on Windows, Linux, Solaris, IRIX, and HP-UX.
:)
Wasn't too difficult either, mind you.
All you have to do is have different executables for each platform that all work off the same graphics, sound, level, etc. files. Given the current state of the gaming scene, it's most likely that the bulk of development is done on the accompanying graphics and audio files, complex game engines notwithstanding.
There ya go, no need for portability of code
The New York raid caught a relatively small fish in its net. Police said they confiscated two computer towers, 15 DVD burners, 1,208 copies of pirate DVDs and about $5,200 in cash. Only one person was arrested.
Boy... some people just have it all, don't they.
And as for Israelis slaughtering Palestinians, I'd call the last, oh, 96 hours or so in Israel a pretty good indication of who the aggressors are. While one side attempts to negotiate in good faith, the other side is setting of suicide bombs in public places. Who's the good guy to you?
Let me join you in karma burning. I think this post is worth the trouble.
First, my bias to give you something to guage by: I'm half Arab half Scandinavian; lived half my life in the middle east, and I do now.
A few points:
1. You have no grasp of the facts on the ground. I do. Please read up on history first and seek the other side's bias first to better draw your own conclusions.
2. Your world view is a little too simplistic to be constructive. There are only good guys and bad guys in elementary school and Hollywood. The peace process gets derailed every time someone starts looking for 'good guys' and 'bad guys'.
3. Slashdot works better when we keep the politics out of it. Or, at least, the misinformed politics. Your post surprised me because I was under the impression that most shashdotters take the trouble to verify what the mainstream media has to say about issues.
Sayonara karma; you have served me well.
Have a look here and here. The speed problems with KDE are in fact being scrutinised in interesting ways.
Someone mentioned elite, etc. Yes, there was 3D graphics before there were dedicated processors on PCI/AGP cards for this purpose. Going by this ethos, shouldn't we also be celebrating the modularization of the sound support and serial line comms support functions of the modern PCs? Why is the birthday of the 3D card celebrated, and not the ISA/PCI/USB modem, or sound card? Or perhaps Mac users should celebrate the day the monitor was split off the case.
Any processor intensive application will spawn modular add-ons to take some of the burden off the CPU. So long as the task itself, of course, is generic enough to have a sufficiently large market. Basic economics.
By saying there was no proper 3D graphics before the advent of the accelerators, you are doing a great injustice to the demo scene as it was back then. Remember the 256 byte competitions? The 1 kb and 4 kb competitions? Now here were people who knew how to milk code for every iota of juice that was there. The (almost) forgotten art of Code Optimisation.
Heck, there was 3D graphics on my old Commodore 128; I still have Elite. What do you call the original Battlezone? The only difference was, there wasn't any specialised add-on card to do this task on the market back then.
I don't mean to disrespect current makers, researchers, coders, and gamers. I just think there's got to be many more significant birthdays to commemorate.
How about a feature on the demo scene on slashdot? The younger crowd will appreciate the demos, and we'll get these funny comments from the war-torn 386 vets about how they used to make their own transistors out of sand...
I was a little disappointed by the article; I've tried Mandrake, RedHat, and Debian but my current system is one I built from ground up from source. There's a lot of lip-service paid to the merits of really learning linux and its internals, through things like the Power-up to Bash prompt HOWTO, but I don't see many people actually doing it.
I've only been using linux since December, but I think building my own system has taught me a thing or three that someone who has used, for example Mandrake for a few years wouldn't know.
There's much to be said for learning by doing. I was expecting a little more than a listing of ready-made distros.
People have been predicting that it will take a dumbing down of some sort for linux to become a viable alternative on the desktop. Is this it?
... when you can just go here?
You're correct in criticising their business model; it's not working and it needs overhaul.
This does not mean, however, that these people should not be getting any money from you or I; reading the comments posted on this issue, I see a lot of people who interpret the 'free' part in 'free software' as meaning 'free of a price tag' rather than the proper 'free to do with as you wish' interpretation.
Mandrake's people need to eat just like you and I, and bread costs money, unlike the software they produce.
What we need here is alternative support methods. It's really unfair to a coder to call feeding him/her 'charity'.
Individual open source contributors have no means of receiving dues in any manner for their work. One possible way to set up a support model for these great people is actually through companies like Mandrake which, if you like, acts as a commercial shell to the coders employed in the name of open software within. Think of it as an uber-geek version of the socialist collective.
If Mandrake really wants to render the free software movement a service, it has a golden opportunity to do this now; thrash out a new business model, feed your people, and show us how you can keep open source contributors sheltered, fed, happy, and free.
> Then they must use some hybrid approach: human editors and AI
Well, there's the implied assumption here that the people running this surveillance operate with standard hardware, where standard means something google, altavista, lycos, etc. can get their hands on. Sketchy information suggests that they do not; specialised hardware seems to be the order of the day.
Besides, there's a lot of research going on in terms of context recognition, here to name one place.
I missed the forum thanks to work; there's one idea that had crossed my mind. I acknowledge that /. needs cash flow to keep moving, but there may be a way out of subscriptions.
Set up polls to gather non-personal data for marketroids, such as what compiler you use and why, what http server you use and why, etc. I'm cerrtain that with some small measure of headscratching, it would be possible to gather information about the geek community to be worth money to a marketing research concern while at the same time keeping it within geek sensibilities, i.e. no 'what is your bank account number' type questions.
Perhaaps some form of questionnaire to be filled out upon registration, retroactively applicable?
Study us; we're geeks. We buy stuff. Expensive stuff. Servers. Networking gear. We're the bleeding edge consumers, what the marketing people call 'early adopters'.
Just don't try to sell us beer.
They are definitely fostering other kinds of piracy...
> probe is now some 7.4 billion miles away, as it > cruises out towards Aldebaran
Alderaan? Oh, aldebaran... Pardon.
> it was successfully contacted last year), but
> the round trip time is over 22 hours
I remember we shashdotted a C-64 once, but a spacecraft?
I got to the part where this man said something to the effect that professional UI designers can do the job better than amateur users and got the willies. That sounded just like a spate of management consultants I know.
With management consultants, if they can get you to believe they're smarter than you and can help you out, they got themselves a job. If you work out for yourself that 'Hey, this is my operation, I'm sure I know it better than a guy who cracks the management textbooks a couple of times a week' then these guys are out of a job.
This is quite the same; if all of a sudden we discovered that users actually knew more about what they want their individual interfaces to look like than the professional designers, guess who would be the first person in line at the employment office? That's right. UI designers such as Mr. Raskin.
This post is not a judgment of whether Mr. Raskin knows better than Joe Sixpack; it is mrerly to point out that this man is not qualified to state his opinion so long as he can't remain objective.
He's fighting for his bread and butter, after all.
I've been here long enough to know that this thread is going to devolve faster than you can say TinyX into the only real challenger to the vim/emacs war; the Linux on the desktop debate.
To save time, we should just symlink to the earlier desktop discussions. Here ya go.
I'm just sitting here wondering why we seek the acceptance of Joe Sixpack.
There's been a lot of admittedly amusing derisory commentary in the posts here concerning this idea, but the idea itself I think has potential if approached properly.
By properly, I mean without neglect for the fun factor, and without neglect for the incidentally gained knowledge and problem-solving skills potential.
I am in management at a fairly large manufacturing firm, and one of the things we suffer from is sub-standard engineer caliber. This is a by-product of the low-grade education systems in this country (in the 3rd world, btw) as is the lack of any real quantifiable work ethic. Sorry to be blunt, but those are the facts I face daily.
I envision a game simulating the production process from raw materials to finished goods, perhaps with a tutorial intro, where the player comes up against all sorts of defects and has to manipulate the production line accorsingly. Your score is based on the traditional standards of defect rates, rework rates, etc. and the scores are stored online, publicly viewable. Given that we have 12 production lines, there could even be a multi-player option.
It's the gaming competitive drive here that will drive people to play, and if the game is properly simulated they _will_ learn.
Let's put this another way, a more significant way perhaps; if someone were to code this game I just described, we would buy it without so much as blinking. I am the decision-maker there, I know what I'm talking about.
Food for thought, I hope.
I think this is what you are talking about.
If we agree on 2 things, that a web site is a UI and that by learning what makes a design bad you can make good ones, then this one'll help you:
The Interface Hall of Shame
It concerns itself mainly with applications, but the concepts are there.
As an afterthought, one tihng I really liked was on the bbc site; there's a link to a low-graphics version, or was that a text only one, I forget. If you want real elegant design, make the content independent of the HTML and generate the page dynamically based on client capability and preference.
Listen, there is only one way you're going to get this copy protection thing off the ground, Mr. Music Mogul. But first, you'll need some equipment:
1 (one) voice synthesis/recognition package
1 (one) lie-detection package (try Makh Shevet)
1 (one) heavy duty electrical cable
Now this is how to go about it. You build the voice synthesis and lie detection stuff into the DVD drive or whatever other kind of device you want to make safe for Joe Public.
Then you put instructions in the manual explaining how to hook up the electrical cable to the main power grid. This should be arranged so that the other end goes into the drive.
It should work like this, Mr. Mogul:
(User inserts DVD and begins to copy it)
(Voice Synthesis Package): "I have detected a disc being copied. Is this for personal backup or piracy purposes?"
(User): "Umm. Backup, of course."
The device should now parse the response in its lie detection module. Failure in this step means we proceed to the final step:
(Device closes the circuit between the main power grid and the Pentium IV tower.)
This way, the device won't be hacked Mr. Mogul, since you're basically killing off would-be libertarians.
Hope this helps, Mr. Music Mogul. I couldn't think of anything else that would keep your copy protection schemes from being hacked.
Mp3's we can download without fear of prosecution? This has got to be a /. first...
Nah, it's no fun to download music when you can't get a horde of lawyers to try to stop you...
I for one fail to see why giving a game out for free can make copyright enforcement harder. Just so I don't get moderated back into my fat32 partition, let me illustrate. I have a copy of Borland C++ 4.51 licensed for personal use which I got off a PC Plus coverdisc. It is fully functional and nominally free, if you forget about the magazine they stuck on it. This act has not diminished Borland's ability to enforce their copyright. I think Mr. Will Wright of Maxis has a somewhat limited understanding of licensing options.
I reluctantly must admit I see how abandonware might very well infringe on the developers' rights. When you retain copyright for a game that was last sold 8 years ago, you technically reserve for yourself the option of re-introducing it. Distribution under abandonware terms means losing this option.
And I disagree respectfully with those who consider this issue related to the length of copyright enforcement; there is no link. If a certain medium can only be copyright-enforced for 6 months, there will still be illegal duplication of that medium within those 6 months. The issue here is not whether 10 years is enough or not; the issue is the legal status of abandonware. And as far as that's concerned, I think the law is most unfortunately clear.
The question now is how to reconcile the legitimate claims of abandonware maintainers/users with the legal rights of copyright holders?
Developers and publishers, IMHO, must begin to consider the promotional potential of that abandoned software. LSL 1, released for free with a few ads in it for LSL42, will never cannibalise the sales of LSL42. We are beginning to see a lot of this happening with magazine cover disks. It's called promotional material, Mr. Publisher.
Looking forward to Lemmings XP.
Legislation can, should, and traditionally has regulated the actions of people. This is how we send murderers to prison.
Well thought out legislation should also regulate intent where it is blatantly obvious that this will lead to action. This is how people get sentenced for conspiracy to commit murder.
Regulation, however, cannot and should not regulate the mental process leading up to either intent or action; this is the thought police straight out of 1984. The notion that thinking certain things can be dangerous to either you or your society.
Regulate this and you've violated every man and woman's right to see all the facts and make the right choice.
Since when did legislation become involved in the average citizen's ability to distinguish between good and bad?
... and no marine life.
DRUDGE EXCLUSIVE: FAO Blasts Chinese Authorities, Accusations of Overfishing Gone too Far
C'mon, seriously, what are the odds of life on two adjacent pieces of rock?