(Old geezer voice) Well, I'll be dipped in shit. (/Old geezer voice)
Seems the folks at Bungie opened up their source code, and there's now a Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux version called AlephOne... and it'll play both the original Marathon, Marathon II, Marathon Infinity, and the total conversion datafiles. Plus it has OpenGL accelleration! Isn't that slick.
Although, the odd thing is that the first website calls itself the "Marathon Open Source Project," but the second one clearly says "Marathon is copyright 1994-present Bungie Studios, all rights reserved. Files are freely downloadable, but are not open-source." I'm hoping the latter claim is just out of date.
Anyway, kudos to Bungie and the rest of the AlephOne community if it works as well as it looks. I have yet to check it out but will probably give it a shot tonight. Maybe they didn't lose their entire souls when they got bought by MS...
The Linux kernel probably won't ever be GPL3, because the license it uses doesn't contain the forward-compatibility clause that the FSF's software does; however, all the GNU utilities (including, I believe, GCC) will be GPL3 and/or GPL2, because they have the forward-looking clause.
So really what it would allow a person to do, is produce a GNU/Solaris as opposed to GNU/Linux -- an OS that would have the Solaris kernel, wrapped in the GNU utilities, without the Linux kernel. I'm not sure if anyone would really want that, because I'm not sure that it would be compatibile with either existing Solaris or existing Linux software without rewriting, and it generally seems to be a solution looking for a problem (not unlike GNU/Hurd).
Information transfer is now relatively free and fast.
Enjoy it while it lasts. Given the lobbying currently going on by the telecommunications companies, and the relative perceived ignorance/apathy of Internet users, I think we're quickly racing towards a future where how much you pay directly affects not only the speed at which you can get information (as it does currently) but also your quality-of-service and connection priority.
You already pay extra if you want a static IP. You pay more than that if you want a synchronous connection where you can send and receive at the same speed. In some cases more than that, if you want certain ports unblocked so you can run a server. The 'two tier' internet already exists in terms of who can distribute information by running a server and who can't; eventually we're going to have that on the receiving side as well. You want to open a ton of connections and do P2P? Extra fee. You want a low-latency connection for doing streaming video or internet telephony? Definitely an extra fee.
I have a feeling that at some point, we're going to look back at these early days of 'all-you-can-eat' Internet access for all, with a certain nostalgia. We're already looking back fondly on the days when anyone could set up a server on their cable modem in their basement.
If you want a look at where the future is headed, take a look at Australia. They used to have unlimited-access internet plans there, but they practically don't exist anymore (I'm told), at least at the consumer level. Instead there are plans with varying levels of bandwidth/transfer caps.
Going forward, once the packet filtering systems get a little better and a little more widespread, you're going to start seeing plans that limit transfer by type: you get unlimited transfer to your ISP's "preferred" VoIP carrier, but if you want to use your own, that'll be $15 extra a month. Same with streaming video and internet radio. "Unknown" and encrypted traffic will be capped or throttled -- so don't try to just tunnel it.
While on the backbones we may have a "two-tier Internet," to the consumer there are going to be many subtle gradations that make up the tiers. It's going to be just like a cell phone: the most basic service costs one thing, but everything extra you want to do with it costs more.
I don't think there's really any good way to avoid this. The Internet is becoming bigger and bigger business, and at the same time the companies that effectively control it are under more and more pressure to find new ways of squeezing revenue from their assets. Given that the government is pretty toothless when it comes to dealing with large corporations and their lobbying arms, I don't think that our children will have anywhere near the unlimited access to information that we've gotten used to lately. At least, not unless we buy it for them.
Er, no we won't. Not with the current bandwidth and channels available.
Personal example: I live in an urban area, and there are already a ton of problems with too many 802.11b setups running on the same channels. Given that there are really only three totally independent channels (where you don't get overlap), it's quite easy to have an area where you should have service, but don't because of collisions between networks.
When my internet at home went down a few weeks ago (due to an unfortunate incident involving a squirrel, and a lot of incompetence on the part of Comcast) I tried to use one of the fifteen or so networks that were being reported by my computer as being in range. I couldn't get a connection on a single one -- they were all piled onto Chans. 1, 6, and 11, and all around the same strength, and when trying to connect to one I'd just get strength figures that jumped between 50% and 0%.
The WiFi bands were not set up with wide-area service in mind. Especially the original 802.11b, which is what you'd want to use for a commercial/free-internet service, because it's most compatible with existing equipment -- that 2.4GHz band was set aside for low-power, Part 15 devices, not broadcast. There's no governing authority to coordinate frequencies and channels and do interference mitigation, and there's overlap from other services as well.
This idyllic picture of free WiFi for everyone, everywhere, is going to come to a screaming halt in any metro area or suburbs where there are a lot of existing equipment installs, especially ones operated by people who don't even know what they're doing or how to change their system from the default channel. The fact that some company is giving you free internet on Channel x isn't going to matter if both your neighbors have their own gateways running on the same channel. At best it's going to cause a lot of collisions and degrade service, at worst it will interrupt it completely. As more and more devices become WiFi enabled, this is going to become a bigger problem.
My suggestion would be to get more frequencies -- lots more. The obvious choices would be the old analog cellular bands and the UHF television spectrum, but fat chance on either of those. We see spectrum, the FCC sees money in the bank (or in the budget, same thing). I have no doubt that we'll get "everwhere access" to the Internet -- it just won't be free; it'll be provided by your friendly cellular company at a stiff monthly charge and with a service contract.
Under the current system, they're going to be the ones who get the bandwidth and frequency allocations necessary for wide-area, interference-free service; the rest of us will be stuck in the crowded electromagnetic ghettos that are the ISM bands, trying to scream to each other over the din of everyone else's transmissions.
I think that's essentially going to be the guy's (admittedly lame) defense -- he didn't actually acquire/misappropriate the source from Microsoft originally, it sounds like he got it from P2P, and then offered it on his website and burned it to CD (or something else) and gave it to the undercover investigator for $20.
I'm not entirely certain with how trade secret law works -- my very vague understanding of it was that you can only go after the first person who steals it from you; once the secret gets into the public domain, secondary redistribution isn't punishable. Perhaps that only works if the distributer can argue successfully that it had already been so diluted, it wasn't a trade secret anymore.
Regardless of the trade secrets, they almost certainly have him for copyright violations anyway, so when the Feds get done with him, then they can move in with a civil suit to fight over the corpse.
The best game for modding that I ever played around with was Marathon Infinity. That, IMO, was Bungie's masterwork, with the possible exception of the unreleased Mac Halo, before they got bought out by the dark side.
They basically released all the internal development tools that they had used to build Marathon 2 and Infinity (after cleaning them up a lot) plus good tutorials and documentation. It was really a modder's dream -- map editor, physics model editor, weapons editor... pretty much everything. The fan levels that came out as a result of that were (in some cases) stunning. There was what is essentially a totally separate game, called Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge, which was a Marathon Infinity total conversion; it probably wasn't the only total-conv either.
If it hadn't been Classic only, I'm sure there'd still be a lot of people playing it today. I thought it was a great thing on Bungie's part to release it like they did; they knew it was the last in the series, so they took the editors that they used themselves and whatnot and turned them into a key feature.
It seems like a no-brainer to me; I wish more companies would do it.
I'll second that. TA was by far my favorite top-down RTS. Command and Conquer (the original, not Generals) came close, but the first time I played TA and saw how it dealt with terrain and high ground, I was hooked.
It's a pity there's no Mac OS X native version. I haven't played it in a while because my Classic install is severely borked and TA by itself, while great, isn't enough motivation to wade through a bunch of Extensions conflicts.
Frankly, I think that's what's killed a bunch of older computer games, that I'd otherwise play -- it's that running them now would be a project, rather than something I could do just for an hour of fun. I'd love to fire up Marathon Infinity or HAVOC, but when I think about how much work getting them running again might require, it's easier just to launch something newer instead.
I guess this is an advantage consoles have over computers; at least consoles that don't get upgraded, anyway. If it works today, then it ought to work fine five years from now, or ten years from now. Aside from some banging and blowing into the cartridges, I can fire up my NES and play Super Mario Bros. III just fine, if I wanted. It'll be interesting to see whether today's console and computer games, which have such a focus on networked play, have that sort of longevity. I doubt it.
I know nothing about the particular details of this deal, but wouldn't it make sense if IBM's sale of the patents also included a reciprocal agreement, that Scansoft would not sue IBM in the future for use of it's IP?
It just seems like IBM, seemly a company obsessed with creating and preserving intellectual capital, wouldn't so hastily sell off patents that they might ever be able to use / need, unless there was a catch, like they got access to Scansoft's portfolio as part of the bargain?
Just speculation, based on what I've read about how Big Blue operates.
Because if you let a company get away with releasing a product that they knew was flawed (if that is indeed the situation here) then next time, they'll cut another corner. And another, and another.
And eventually you'll be left, as a consumer, paying for shitty products and not even knowing better, because that's all there will be.
It's an extreme scenario, obviously, but companies have a responsibility to stand behind their products, or at least make them live up to their advertised/promised specifications. If they do not, then they need to get some sort of discouragement so they don't do it again.
Companies think and act in terms of money. If you want to influence their behavior, make it cost them. Therefore, a lawsuit is often the proper tool to use when dealing with a company, if you want to have any hope of achieving change.
What do you really think people ought to do? Start a letter-writing campaign? "Mr. Gates, we really think your software sucks. We're still going to buy it, but we just thought you should know." That's really going to help.
If you really want to change anything, the best kind of letter you can write is the kind that gets delivered by a process server.
Huh? I think maybe we're not talking about the same thing. Or maybe we are and I'm just missing you.
My goal is to produce images which will eventually be printed out (using a lightjet photo printer). So the goal here is to try to make the finished image look as close to the image on the screen that I see while editing, within the tolerances of my equipment (which admittedly includes an non-individually-calibrated monitor, because I'm poor).
The printer has an entirely different "colorspace" than the monitor. That is, the monitor, which uses the sRGB colorspace, reproduces a slightly different color when fed the RGB value for "red" (R,G,B=255,0,0) than what comes out of the printer when given that same value. In the case of the particular printer that I'm using, a Fuji Frontier, the colorspaces are quite radically different. Secondary and tertiary colors will look entirely different when printed out than they do on the monitor, without conversion. (The real test is to reproduce a 50% gray, and it's blindingly obvious how different it is once you see it side-by-side.)
To combat this, I printed out a test target from the printer and had someone generate a ICC color profile based on this, which relates how the printer actually translates RGB values into reflected-light output. Alternately, there are standard profiles available for different lightjet printers and various paper/chemistry combinations online.
The last stage of my workflow in Photoshop is to convert the image from the sRGB colorspace that I use for editing, to the Frontier's space. Then I put it on a CD, and tell the operator to print it without any corrections. There's still a slight variation between output and the monitor, because it's not entirely calibrated, but it's close enough (and better than it would be without the profiles, because it avoids using the Frontier's internal "enhancement").
I think, based on what I've read, that the GIMP does this conversion in the most basic sense. It ought to, it's not exactly brain surgery or state-of-the-art imaging, just some number crunching. I guess I'll have to give it a shot sometime and see how it is.
I'm aware. That's why I didn't use a GLBT analogy in Disneyland -- instead I picked something that Disney definitely wouldn't be cool with, blatant anti-American/anti-governmental demonstrations. (Or really any kind of politics you want, most likely.)
It's a question of what people are going to a certain place to see. You don't go to Disneyland to see politics, but rather to leave stuff like that behind, and -- at least according to Blizzard -- people don't join WoW to deal with real-world sexuality issues.
Good point. I totally agree -- there were certainly people I've worked with in the sciences that we absolutely entertaining, in addition to arguably brilliant. However, I think they probably would have been just as entertaining if they had been working behind the counter at McDonalds; that's just who they were, and it was everyone else's good fortune that they ended up in our field.
And you're right, they've made TV shows about jobs that are probably quite tedious in real life (e.g., crime scene investigation). However I'm not sure that those shows are really representative of the professions that they portray, and that was sort of an implicit requirement in my thinking about a science-related show. I'm just not sure of how good an idea it would be to heavily "Hollywoodize" a science profession, and whether that would be a benefit in the long run in terms of encouraging people into it, under potentially false pretenses.
I suppose the answer would be to wait a few years, and ask people in the crime scene investigation or forensic pathology fields whether there has been an influx of new people who either ended up in over their heads, or became dissatisfied and left because of shattered expectations, built up by television shows.
Well, I don't have to frequently, which is why although I find the ndiswrappers driver very annoying, it's not unusable.
A month or so ago there was a period when I was moving the machine around between two locations, and each time it required going through this obnoxious process to get the machine to use the different WLAN. Eventually I just got everyone to agree on the same SSID (they're not close to each other), so when I do need to move the machine, it doesn't realize the change.
Once I get everything working, the driver works well enough. It's just that it would be a totally unacceptable solution if you had to switch between networks.
I can only imagine the horror that would be a notebook computer with one of these cursed Marvell chipsets.
then invest in companies which have your values and ethics, and work for a company which has your values and ethics
This is exactly the problem. Until recently, I would have said that Google was a company with my values and ethics.
However, I was obviously mistaken. The list of other possible candidates is rather short, too.
Frankly, I'm starting to warm to the position that having an IPO and preserving any personal morals are incompatible. I wouldn't fault anyone for selling out, as long as they admitted it. But since this China thing, I've gone through disappointment and now am just mildly disgusted with Google. They're worse than sellouts -- they're sellouts who haven't realized or admitted to themselves that they sold out.
I'd rather own stock in Raytheon, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, thanks very much. At least they don't go too far out of their way to gloss over what they do -- if anything, they go the other direction and make building instruments of death seem almost sexy. I'm more comfortable with that than I am with Google's whining hypocrisy.
Read their blog entry. They did and had been -- with 90% uptime!
Google users in China today struggle with a service that, to be blunt, isn't very good. Google.com appears to be down around 10% of the time.
Uncensored access to real information, in direct contravention of an oppressive, inhumane, undemocratic regime? And they manage 90% uptime? They ought to get a medal or something.
I think everyone needs to understand what this means. Google -- real, uncensored Google -- was available in China most of the time, until they pulled the plug on it, and replaced it with the censored service at Google.cn.
Instead of realizing how good this is for what they were doing, they use it as a mealy-mouthed excuse for replacing it with a censored service -- but hey, it'll have four nines to the right of the decimal point in terms of uptime! Most importantly, Google will now be able to sell local advertising, which it probably wasn't before, so they get their payoff. And Chinese internet users? They get to access their leaders' spoonfed propaganda, any time of the day or night! Isn't it wonderful?
I think that's because, with some rare exceptions, the day-to-day lives of people working in labs are honestly not something that you'd want to watch on TV.
Real physics research isn't like Bill Nye. It's quite often hours of tedious data collection, followed by days or weeks of number crunching. That's not to say that it's not enjoyable -- I loved the time I spent working in the lab -- but it's going to make exactly thrilling television.
I've talked to people doing some very interesting and cutting-edge biochem research, and had them admit that after spending 8 or 9 hours in a lab, to an outside observer, at the end all they have is a few tenths of a gram of white goo to show for it.
I think this is true for most sciences. With some exceptions, real research isn't terribly flashy. It's a painstaking process, and the rewards that drive people are mostly internal and inscrutable to those who don't share the same interests.
Just think of how hard it is for someone who works in the sciences to go home at night and tell their spouse/S.O. what they did at work that day -- now imagine how hard it would be to tell a few hundred thousand people that, and keep their interest. It's not easy to do, and I think that's why you don't see much mainstream TV about it.
Exactly. I'm not sure why this didn't strike them... if they want to reach out to women who are entering the job market, 11AM - 2PM is definitely NOT the right timeslot. And frankly, I don't think that a soap opera is the right format, either. It seems to me they have a reputation as being something watched by more 'mature' folks... I'm sure if you contacted the networks and either asked nicely or pretended to be interested in buying a lot of advertising time, they could give you demographic data on who exactly watches them.
I think shows like CSI and Bones are really doing more for the image of women in science, and for creating role models that young women are going to want to follow, than soap operas ever have or are likely to.
This is only tangentially relelvant to your post, but I thought I'd point out that in WoW, they have a system for PvP that I think is pretty good -- in order to attack someone in your own faction, you have to challenge them to a duel, and they have to accept. A duel flag (literally, a flag that's standing nearby on the ground) is set, so everyone knows what's going on, and you can go at each other. Or they can refuse the challenge, and nothing happens.
It seems like a pretty good system to me. I've been playing for about a month and haven't ever been randomly attacked, and I play on a PvP server.
I don't know if this system is something Blizzard invented specifically for WoW, or if it's more or less standard within MMORPGs...but I thought it was a pretty good idea.
Just thought I'd toss in my two cents -- I can't lay claim to quite the "old fogey" status that you can, but I'm no spring chicken either, and I'm quite notoriously bad at games requiring a lot of fast reflexes. I also dislike games which require you to die repeatedly in order to complete them or figure them out; the combination of those two dislikes has effectively kept me out of console and computer gaming (with a few notable exceptions over the years), probably to the betterment of my other hobbies. That's not to say I don't like games or gaming; I'd just never found a game that I really enjoyed that much for more than a few days.
I recommend finding someone who plays WoW and just watching gameplay for a little while before you decide if it's for you. This is what caused me to get involved recently, after having completely ignored it and other games in the genre for as long as I can remember.
I can't compare WoW to Ultima Online or any of the other competing modern MMORPGs, but I will say that I like it overall. I think they've done a good job in terms of game and level design, at least for the starting player. You usually start off in an area that's tough to kill yourself in (and dying as a new character isn't that much of an annoyance anyway, it just involves walking to your body from a graveyard). About the only thing I used the manual for was as a comparison/information source on the various races. And in retrospect I shouldn't have bothered, the "fan documentation" available online is far more complete and detailed anyway. I also find it amusing that one of the more effective ways to make money in the game is through commodities arbitrage in the in-game Auction House. This in itself is almost an 'in-game-game,' if you have a head for numbers.
The game's shortfalls are that there's no real documentation or tutorials that will help you when you start to interact with other players, which basically happens (or did in my case, anyway) when you start working your way in from your start location out in the boondocks to a more major, populated city. This might vary on a more or less crowded server, though. Also, there is a certain point you hit in your character's development, where you've gotten bored with slaughtering the beasts that spawn randomly everywhere, but are still too weak for people to want you as part of a group to do the instanced dungeon missions. This is a bit of a drag, and something I wish Blizzard would address (maybe with some lower-level instances or something), because it makes it tough to get group combat experience.
At least that I've encountered, there isn't a ton of complex strategy or "twitch" gaming in WoW. There's a certain amount of strategy to combat in groups, but it's not like playing a RTS game, it's more common sense. There's not a lot of skill involved in combat -- at least not like there is in a FPS game -- it's mainly weight-of-numbers. Combined, this makes it much more newbie-friendly than other styles of games.
Anyway, the last point I'd make is that I think for a mature, well-balanced person, with any sort of time-management skills to speak of, the whole "MMORPG addiction" thing is way exaggerated. It's a fun game, but it's not heroin. I generally play on Saturday afternoons (a suggestion -- if weekends are your style, pick a low-traffic server so there's not a wait to log on) and occasionally an hour or so on an evening if I've nothing else to do and I'm not dead tired. Sure, I don't progress very fast through the game, but that's not what it's about.
At any rate, good luck with your choice. Overall, I'd say it's put the fun back in computer gaming for me, and it's been a while since I've said that about anything.
I'm guessing because there's a lot more of the latter, and a lot more, to Blizzard, means a lot more money.
Yeah, pretty much.
I think Blizzard is also taking the "don't make waves" style of law enforcement. That is, a certain amount of antisocial behavior is allowed, as long as it doesn't rock the boat, so to speak. And conversely, your right to say whatever you want is going to be conditional that it doesn't cause a problem in their pretty little world.
WoW is a lot like Disneyland. It's a part of the real world, and yet it's not. It's all quite fake and intended to create the an illusion (in Disneyland, an idyllic place to take the kids; in WoW a world where you can take on an alternate persona and hack at people with swords) which people pay for the priviledge of experiencing. The Disney folks are probably not going to let you burn the American flag in front of EPCOT Center -- even though it may be your right to do somewhere else -- because a whole lot of other people who are paying to be there don't want to see it. Likewise, Blizzard isn't going to let you set up a GLBT guild, because a lot of other customers would dislike it. (And I suspect they have a fear of being portrayed as a place for perverts in the Conservative media, which could cost them a lot of customers; there are still a lot of people for whom "gay" is synomous with "pervert" or "pedophile," especially in regards to interaction with their children.)
I admit, it's not very fair. However, WoW is essentially a private playground, and they can do what they like in there. Anyone who doesn't like the rules can take their membership fee and go home.
It would fall under their responsibility to do "Due Diligence". You can Google for the concept (ironic, given the discussion -- do feel free to "Yahoo" for it instead). It's not a criminal violation, but it opens you (if you were the CEO) to civil liabilities, I believe.
However the much more likely scenario is, if you were a CEO or Director who refused for moral reasons to do something that was legal and would benefit your shareholders, that they would have a no-confidence vote and replace you. It's tough to find records of that and say exactly how often it happens, because it can be handled entirely internal to the company. I've heard stories about this happening back when the first major rounds of Asian manufacturing outsourcing occured in the 1970s and 80s, but I can't give you any concrete examples.
However I don't think Google's Directors can take this route out of responsibility ("the Board made us do it"), because it's my understanding that they were not in anywhere close to a position where they could be taken out via a boardroom coup, because of the way the shares are currently distributed.
I think the "risk of loss" issue is not one that is necessarily important for a computer company to take into consideration. I mean, if you're going to lose your USB modem, then maybe you should consider sticking to internet cafes. There are a host of other things that you could lose instead, which would all be much harder to replace than it, and would really be show-stoppers. E.g., your power adaptor, or VGA adaptor. Or the phone cable itself.
I don't see any reason why a person working from the road would really be that much more likely to lose their USB modem than they would any other external component -- and at least you can get a USB modem quickly. If you use an Apple laptop and you lose your power adaptor, you're looking at a hefty chunk of change for a new one.
My work notebook, which is not an Apple (sadly), has its own small travelling infrastructure. Power cable (two parts -- computer to box and box to wall), modem cable, ethernet cable, mouse (because the trackpad sucks), VGA breakout cable, 1/8" M-M audio cable, external floppy drive. This is basically a standard loadout for someone who travels with their primary computer, and less than many people I know (who use external numeric keypads, for instance, or SmartCard readers). Would it be nicer to have all this stuff built-in? Maybe, but at a certain point the thing would be huge, and start looking like a Swiss Army knife. But the important part here is that this thing requires an insane amount of accessories, but people still buy them.
I think Apple took a look around at the competition and realized that people seem to be comfortable with external peripherals; even then, they went and made the lowest-cost and least-used item on the motherboard external. It impacts few users, and its impact on the users that it does effect is minor.
Great use if you happen to have a PCMCIA flash card sitting around (are those things even made anymore?), but to anyone else in that situation, I think the obvious solution would just be to buy a USB floppy drive. Not only can you use it to tranfer files from your 486 laptop (which I'm assuming has a FD built-in or as an external option, unless you lost it), but you can also use it to get anything that somebody might send you in the mail. Not that it's likely to happen very often, but they're handy to have around sometimes. And they're relatively cheap and easily available.
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Said the AC: "You need to check out http://source.bungie.org/ and http://trilogyrelease.bungie.org/ "
... and it'll play both the original Marathon, Marathon II, Marathon Infinity, and the total conversion datafiles. Plus it has OpenGL accelleration! Isn't that slick.
(Old geezer voice) Well, I'll be dipped in shit. (/Old geezer voice)
Seems the folks at Bungie opened up their source code, and there's now a Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux version called AlephOne
Although, the odd thing is that the first website calls itself the "Marathon Open Source Project," but the second one clearly says "Marathon is copyright 1994-present Bungie Studios, all rights reserved. Files are freely downloadable, but are not open-source." I'm hoping the latter claim is just out of date.
Anyway, kudos to Bungie and the rest of the AlephOne community if it works as well as it looks. I have yet to check it out but will probably give it a shot tonight. Maybe they didn't lose their entire souls when they got bought by MS...
The Linux kernel probably won't ever be GPL3, because the license it uses doesn't contain the forward-compatibility clause that the FSF's software does; however, all the GNU utilities (including, I believe, GCC) will be GPL3 and/or GPL2, because they have the forward-looking clause.
So really what it would allow a person to do, is produce a GNU/Solaris as opposed to GNU/Linux -- an OS that would have the Solaris kernel, wrapped in the GNU utilities, without the Linux kernel. I'm not sure if anyone would really want that, because I'm not sure that it would be compatibile with either existing Solaris or existing Linux software without rewriting, and it generally seems to be a solution looking for a problem (not unlike GNU/Hurd).
Information transfer is now relatively free and fast.
Enjoy it while it lasts. Given the lobbying currently going on by the telecommunications companies, and the relative perceived ignorance/apathy of Internet users, I think we're quickly racing towards a future where how much you pay directly affects not only the speed at which you can get information (as it does currently) but also your quality-of-service and connection priority.
You already pay extra if you want a static IP. You pay more than that if you want a synchronous connection where you can send and receive at the same speed. In some cases more than that, if you want certain ports unblocked so you can run a server. The 'two tier' internet already exists in terms of who can distribute information by running a server and who can't; eventually we're going to have that on the receiving side as well. You want to open a ton of connections and do P2P? Extra fee. You want a low-latency connection for doing streaming video or internet telephony? Definitely an extra fee.
I have a feeling that at some point, we're going to look back at these early days of 'all-you-can-eat' Internet access for all, with a certain nostalgia. We're already looking back fondly on the days when anyone could set up a server on their cable modem in their basement.
If you want a look at where the future is headed, take a look at Australia. They used to have unlimited-access internet plans there, but they practically don't exist anymore (I'm told), at least at the consumer level. Instead there are plans with varying levels of bandwidth/transfer caps.
Going forward, once the packet filtering systems get a little better and a little more widespread, you're going to start seeing plans that limit transfer by type: you get unlimited transfer to your ISP's "preferred" VoIP carrier, but if you want to use your own, that'll be $15 extra a month. Same with streaming video and internet radio. "Unknown" and encrypted traffic will be capped or throttled -- so don't try to just tunnel it.
While on the backbones we may have a "two-tier Internet," to the consumer there are going to be many subtle gradations that make up the tiers. It's going to be just like a cell phone: the most basic service costs one thing, but everything extra you want to do with it costs more.
I don't think there's really any good way to avoid this. The Internet is becoming bigger and bigger business, and at the same time the companies that effectively control it are under more and more pressure to find new ways of squeezing revenue from their assets. Given that the government is pretty toothless when it comes to dealing with large corporations and their lobbying arms, I don't think that our children will have anywhere near the unlimited access to information that we've gotten used to lately. At least, not unless we buy it for them.
Er, no we won't. Not with the current bandwidth and channels available.
Personal example: I live in an urban area, and there are already a ton of problems with too many 802.11b setups running on the same channels. Given that there are really only three totally independent channels (where you don't get overlap), it's quite easy to have an area where you should have service, but don't because of collisions between networks.
When my internet at home went down a few weeks ago (due to an unfortunate incident involving a squirrel, and a lot of incompetence on the part of Comcast) I tried to use one of the fifteen or so networks that were being reported by my computer as being in range. I couldn't get a connection on a single one -- they were all piled onto Chans. 1, 6, and 11, and all around the same strength, and when trying to connect to one I'd just get strength figures that jumped between 50% and 0%.
The WiFi bands were not set up with wide-area service in mind. Especially the original 802.11b, which is what you'd want to use for a commercial/free-internet service, because it's most compatible with existing equipment -- that 2.4GHz band was set aside for low-power, Part 15 devices, not broadcast. There's no governing authority to coordinate frequencies and channels and do interference mitigation, and there's overlap from other services as well.
This idyllic picture of free WiFi for everyone, everywhere, is going to come to a screaming halt in any metro area or suburbs where there are a lot of existing equipment installs, especially ones operated by people who don't even know what they're doing or how to change their system from the default channel. The fact that some company is giving you free internet on Channel x isn't going to matter if both your neighbors have their own gateways running on the same channel. At best it's going to cause a lot of collisions and degrade service, at worst it will interrupt it completely. As more and more devices become WiFi enabled, this is going to become a bigger problem.
My suggestion would be to get more frequencies -- lots more. The obvious choices would be the old analog cellular bands and the UHF television spectrum, but fat chance on either of those. We see spectrum, the FCC sees money in the bank (or in the budget, same thing). I have no doubt that we'll get "everwhere access" to the Internet -- it just won't be free; it'll be provided by your friendly cellular company at a stiff monthly charge and with a service contract.
Under the current system, they're going to be the ones who get the bandwidth and frequency allocations necessary for wide-area, interference-free service; the rest of us will be stuck in the crowded electromagnetic ghettos that are the ISM bands, trying to scream to each other over the din of everyone else's transmissions.
I think that's essentially going to be the guy's (admittedly lame) defense -- he didn't actually acquire/misappropriate the source from Microsoft originally, it sounds like he got it from P2P, and then offered it on his website and burned it to CD (or something else) and gave it to the undercover investigator for $20.
I'm not entirely certain with how trade secret law works -- my very vague understanding of it was that you can only go after the first person who steals it from you; once the secret gets into the public domain, secondary redistribution isn't punishable. Perhaps that only works if the distributer can argue successfully that it had already been so diluted, it wasn't a trade secret anymore.
Regardless of the trade secrets, they almost certainly have him for copyright violations anyway, so when the Feds get done with him, then they can move in with a civil suit to fight over the corpse.
The best game for modding that I ever played around with was Marathon Infinity. That, IMO, was Bungie's masterwork, with the possible exception of the unreleased Mac Halo, before they got bought out by the dark side.
... pretty much everything. The fan levels that came out as a result of that were (in some cases) stunning. There was what is essentially a totally separate game, called Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge, which was a Marathon Infinity total conversion; it probably wasn't the only total-conv either.
They basically released all the internal development tools that they had used to build Marathon 2 and Infinity (after cleaning them up a lot) plus good tutorials and documentation. It was really a modder's dream -- map editor, physics model editor, weapons editor
If it hadn't been Classic only, I'm sure there'd still be a lot of people playing it today. I thought it was a great thing on Bungie's part to release it like they did; they knew it was the last in the series, so they took the editors that they used themselves and whatnot and turned them into a key feature.
It seems like a no-brainer to me; I wish more companies would do it.
I'll second that. TA was by far my favorite top-down RTS. Command and Conquer (the original, not Generals) came close, but the first time I played TA and saw how it dealt with terrain and high ground, I was hooked.
It's a pity there's no Mac OS X native version. I haven't played it in a while because my Classic install is severely borked and TA by itself, while great, isn't enough motivation to wade through a bunch of Extensions conflicts.
Frankly, I think that's what's killed a bunch of older computer games, that I'd otherwise play -- it's that running them now would be a project, rather than something I could do just for an hour of fun. I'd love to fire up Marathon Infinity or HAVOC, but when I think about how much work getting them running again might require, it's easier just to launch something newer instead.
I guess this is an advantage consoles have over computers; at least consoles that don't get upgraded, anyway. If it works today, then it ought to work fine five years from now, or ten years from now. Aside from some banging and blowing into the cartridges, I can fire up my NES and play Super Mario Bros. III just fine, if I wanted. It'll be interesting to see whether today's console and computer games, which have such a focus on networked play, have that sort of longevity. I doubt it.
I know nothing about the particular details of this deal, but wouldn't it make sense if IBM's sale of the patents also included a reciprocal agreement, that Scansoft would not sue IBM in the future for use of it's IP?
It just seems like IBM, seemly a company obsessed with creating and preserving intellectual capital, wouldn't so hastily sell off patents that they might ever be able to use / need, unless there was a catch, like they got access to Scansoft's portfolio as part of the bargain?
Just speculation, based on what I've read about how Big Blue operates.
Because if you let a company get away with releasing a product that they knew was flawed (if that is indeed the situation here) then next time, they'll cut another corner. And another, and another.
And eventually you'll be left, as a consumer, paying for shitty products and not even knowing better, because that's all there will be.
It's an extreme scenario, obviously, but companies have a responsibility to stand behind their products, or at least make them live up to their advertised/promised specifications. If they do not, then they need to get some sort of discouragement so they don't do it again.
Companies think and act in terms of money. If you want to influence their behavior, make it cost them. Therefore, a lawsuit is often the proper tool to use when dealing with a company, if you want to have any hope of achieving change.
What do you really think people ought to do? Start a letter-writing campaign? "Mr. Gates, we really think your software sucks. We're still going to buy it, but we just thought you should know." That's really going to help.
If you really want to change anything, the best kind of letter you can write is the kind that gets delivered by a process server.
Huh? I think maybe we're not talking about the same thing. Or maybe we are and I'm just missing you.
My goal is to produce images which will eventually be printed out (using a lightjet photo printer). So the goal here is to try to make the finished image look as close to the image on the screen that I see while editing, within the tolerances of my equipment (which admittedly includes an non-individually-calibrated monitor, because I'm poor).
The printer has an entirely different "colorspace" than the monitor. That is, the monitor, which uses the sRGB colorspace, reproduces a slightly different color when fed the RGB value for "red" (R,G,B=255,0,0) than what comes out of the printer when given that same value. In the case of the particular printer that I'm using, a Fuji Frontier, the colorspaces are quite radically different. Secondary and tertiary colors will look entirely different when printed out than they do on the monitor, without conversion. (The real test is to reproduce a 50% gray, and it's blindingly obvious how different it is once you see it side-by-side.)
To combat this, I printed out a test target from the printer and had someone generate a ICC color profile based on this, which relates how the printer actually translates RGB values into reflected-light output. Alternately, there are standard profiles available for different lightjet printers and various paper/chemistry combinations online.
The last stage of my workflow in Photoshop is to convert the image from the sRGB colorspace that I use for editing, to the Frontier's space. Then I put it on a CD, and tell the operator to print it without any corrections. There's still a slight variation between output and the monitor, because it's not entirely calibrated, but it's close enough (and better than it would be without the profiles, because it avoids using the Frontier's internal "enhancement").
I think, based on what I've read, that the GIMP does this conversion in the most basic sense. It ought to, it's not exactly brain surgery or state-of-the-art imaging, just some number crunching. I guess I'll have to give it a shot sometime and see how it is.
I'm aware. That's why I didn't use a GLBT analogy in Disneyland -- instead I picked something that Disney definitely wouldn't be cool with, blatant anti-American/anti-governmental demonstrations. (Or really any kind of politics you want, most likely.)
It's a question of what people are going to a certain place to see. You don't go to Disneyland to see politics, but rather to leave stuff like that behind, and -- at least according to Blizzard -- people don't join WoW to deal with real-world sexuality issues.
Good point. I totally agree -- there were certainly people I've worked with in the sciences that we absolutely entertaining, in addition to arguably brilliant. However, I think they probably would have been just as entertaining if they had been working behind the counter at McDonalds; that's just who they were, and it was everyone else's good fortune that they ended up in our field.
And you're right, they've made TV shows about jobs that are probably quite tedious in real life (e.g., crime scene investigation). However I'm not sure that those shows are really representative of the professions that they portray, and that was sort of an implicit requirement in my thinking about a science-related show. I'm just not sure of how good an idea it would be to heavily "Hollywoodize" a science profession, and whether that would be a benefit in the long run in terms of encouraging people into it, under potentially false pretenses.
I suppose the answer would be to wait a few years, and ask people in the crime scene investigation or forensic pathology fields whether there has been an influx of new people who either ended up in over their heads, or became dissatisfied and left because of shattered expectations, built up by television shows.
Well, I don't have to frequently, which is why although I find the ndiswrappers driver very annoying, it's not unusable.
A month or so ago there was a period when I was moving the machine around between two locations, and each time it required going through this obnoxious process to get the machine to use the different WLAN. Eventually I just got everyone to agree on the same SSID (they're not close to each other), so when I do need to move the machine, it doesn't realize the change.
Once I get everything working, the driver works well enough. It's just that it would be a totally unacceptable solution if you had to switch between networks.
I can only imagine the horror that would be a notebook computer with one of these cursed Marvell chipsets.
then invest in companies which have your values and ethics, and work for a company which has your values and ethics
This is exactly the problem. Until recently, I would have said that Google was a company with my values and ethics.
However, I was obviously mistaken. The list of other possible candidates is rather short, too.
Frankly, I'm starting to warm to the position that having an IPO and preserving any personal morals are incompatible. I wouldn't fault anyone for selling out, as long as they admitted it. But since this China thing, I've gone through disappointment and now am just mildly disgusted with Google. They're worse than sellouts -- they're sellouts who haven't realized or admitted to themselves that they sold out.
I'd rather own stock in Raytheon, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, thanks very much. At least they don't go too far out of their way to gloss over what they do -- if anything, they go the other direction and make building instruments of death seem almost sexy. I'm more comfortable with that than I am with Google's whining hypocrisy.
Uncensored access to real information, in direct contravention of an oppressive, inhumane, undemocratic regime? And they manage 90% uptime? They ought to get a medal or something.
I think everyone needs to understand what this means. Google -- real, uncensored Google -- was available in China most of the time, until they pulled the plug on it, and replaced it with the censored service at Google.cn.
Instead of realizing how good this is for what they were doing, they use it as a mealy-mouthed excuse for replacing it with a censored service -- but hey, it'll have four nines to the right of the decimal point in terms of uptime! Most importantly, Google will now be able to sell local advertising, which it probably wasn't before, so they get their payoff. And Chinese internet users? They get to access their leaders' spoonfed propaganda, any time of the day or night! Isn't it wonderful?
At Google, it's not censorship, it's an upgrade!
I think that's because, with some rare exceptions, the day-to-day lives of people working in labs are honestly not something that you'd want to watch on TV.
Real physics research isn't like Bill Nye. It's quite often hours of tedious data collection, followed by days or weeks of number crunching. That's not to say that it's not enjoyable -- I loved the time I spent working in the lab -- but it's going to make exactly thrilling television.
I've talked to people doing some very interesting and cutting-edge biochem research, and had them admit that after spending 8 or 9 hours in a lab, to an outside observer, at the end all they have is a few tenths of a gram of white goo to show for it.
I think this is true for most sciences. With some exceptions, real research isn't terribly flashy. It's a painstaking process, and the rewards that drive people are mostly internal and inscrutable to those who don't share the same interests.
Just think of how hard it is for someone who works in the sciences to go home at night and tell their spouse/S.O. what they did at work that day -- now imagine how hard it would be to tell a few hundred thousand people that, and keep their interest. It's not easy to do, and I think that's why you don't see much mainstream TV about it.
Exactly. I'm not sure why this didn't strike them ... if they want to reach out to women who are entering the job market, 11AM - 2PM is definitely NOT the right timeslot. And frankly, I don't think that a soap opera is the right format, either. It seems to me they have a reputation as being something watched by more 'mature' folks ... I'm sure if you contacted the networks and either asked nicely or pretended to be interested in buying a lot of advertising time, they could give you demographic data on who exactly watches them.
I think shows like CSI and Bones are really doing more for the image of women in science, and for creating role models that young women are going to want to follow, than soap operas ever have or are likely to.
This is only tangentially relelvant to your post, but I thought I'd point out that in WoW, they have a system for PvP that I think is pretty good -- in order to attack someone in your own faction, you have to challenge them to a duel, and they have to accept. A duel flag (literally, a flag that's standing nearby on the ground) is set, so everyone knows what's going on, and you can go at each other. Or they can refuse the challenge, and nothing happens.
It seems like a pretty good system to me. I've been playing for about a month and haven't ever been randomly attacked, and I play on a PvP server.
I don't know if this system is something Blizzard invented specifically for WoW, or if it's more or less standard within MMORPGs...but I thought it was a pretty good idea.
Just thought I'd toss in my two cents -- I can't lay claim to quite the "old fogey" status that you can, but I'm no spring chicken either, and I'm quite notoriously bad at games requiring a lot of fast reflexes. I also dislike games which require you to die repeatedly in order to complete them or figure them out; the combination of those two dislikes has effectively kept me out of console and computer gaming (with a few notable exceptions over the years), probably to the betterment of my other hobbies. That's not to say I don't like games or gaming; I'd just never found a game that I really enjoyed that much for more than a few days.
I recommend finding someone who plays WoW and just watching gameplay for a little while before you decide if it's for you. This is what caused me to get involved recently, after having completely ignored it and other games in the genre for as long as I can remember.
I can't compare WoW to Ultima Online or any of the other competing modern MMORPGs, but I will say that I like it overall. I think they've done a good job in terms of game and level design, at least for the starting player. You usually start off in an area that's tough to kill yourself in (and dying as a new character isn't that much of an annoyance anyway, it just involves walking to your body from a graveyard). About the only thing I used the manual for was as a comparison/information source on the various races. And in retrospect I shouldn't have bothered, the "fan documentation" available online is far more complete and detailed anyway. I also find it amusing that one of the more effective ways to make money in the game is through commodities arbitrage in the in-game Auction House. This in itself is almost an 'in-game-game,' if you have a head for numbers.
The game's shortfalls are that there's no real documentation or tutorials that will help you when you start to interact with other players, which basically happens (or did in my case, anyway) when you start working your way in from your start location out in the boondocks to a more major, populated city. This might vary on a more or less crowded server, though. Also, there is a certain point you hit in your character's development, where you've gotten bored with slaughtering the beasts that spawn randomly everywhere, but are still too weak for people to want you as part of a group to do the instanced dungeon missions. This is a bit of a drag, and something I wish Blizzard would address (maybe with some lower-level instances or something), because it makes it tough to get group combat experience.
At least that I've encountered, there isn't a ton of complex strategy or "twitch" gaming in WoW. There's a certain amount of strategy to combat in groups, but it's not like playing a RTS game, it's more common sense. There's not a lot of skill involved in combat -- at least not like there is in a FPS game -- it's mainly weight-of-numbers. Combined, this makes it much more newbie-friendly than other styles of games.
Anyway, the last point I'd make is that I think for a mature, well-balanced person, with any sort of time-management skills to speak of, the whole "MMORPG addiction" thing is way exaggerated. It's a fun game, but it's not heroin. I generally play on Saturday afternoons (a suggestion -- if weekends are your style, pick a low-traffic server so there's not a wait to log on) and occasionally an hour or so on an evening if I've nothing else to do and I'm not dead tired. Sure, I don't progress very fast through the game, but that's not what it's about.
At any rate, good luck with your choice. Overall, I'd say it's put the fun back in computer gaming for me, and it's been a while since I've said that about anything.
This is why I read Slashdot.
Priceless.
As long as you're plugging them, care to tell why they're better (or at least, less bad/evil/whatever) than Amazon or BN?
(I'm not trolling, I'm honestly interested -- I'm always up for considering new places to buy stuff, if there's a reason to.)
I'm guessing because there's a lot more of the latter, and a lot more, to Blizzard, means a lot more money.
Yeah, pretty much.
I think Blizzard is also taking the "don't make waves" style of law enforcement. That is, a certain amount of antisocial behavior is allowed, as long as it doesn't rock the boat, so to speak. And conversely, your right to say whatever you want is going to be conditional that it doesn't cause a problem in their pretty little world.
WoW is a lot like Disneyland. It's a part of the real world, and yet it's not. It's all quite fake and intended to create the an illusion (in Disneyland, an idyllic place to take the kids; in WoW a world where you can take on an alternate persona and hack at people with swords) which people pay for the priviledge of experiencing. The Disney folks are probably not going to let you burn the American flag in front of EPCOT Center -- even though it may be your right to do somewhere else -- because a whole lot of other people who are paying to be there don't want to see it. Likewise, Blizzard isn't going to let you set up a GLBT guild, because a lot of other customers would dislike it. (And I suspect they have a fear of being portrayed as a place for perverts in the Conservative media, which could cost them a lot of customers; there are still a lot of people for whom "gay" is synomous with "pervert" or "pedophile," especially in regards to interaction with their children.)
I admit, it's not very fair. However, WoW is essentially a private playground, and they can do what they like in there. Anyone who doesn't like the rules can take their membership fee and go home.
It would fall under their responsibility to do "Due Diligence". You can Google for the concept (ironic, given the discussion -- do feel free to "Yahoo" for it instead). It's not a criminal violation, but it opens you (if you were the CEO) to civil liabilities, I believe.
However the much more likely scenario is, if you were a CEO or Director who refused for moral reasons to do something that was legal and would benefit your shareholders, that they would have a no-confidence vote and replace you. It's tough to find records of that and say exactly how often it happens, because it can be handled entirely internal to the company. I've heard stories about this happening back when the first major rounds of Asian manufacturing outsourcing occured in the 1970s and 80s, but I can't give you any concrete examples.
However I don't think Google's Directors can take this route out of responsibility ("the Board made us do it"), because it's my understanding that they were not in anywhere close to a position where they could be taken out via a boardroom coup, because of the way the shares are currently distributed.
I think the "risk of loss" issue is not one that is necessarily important for a computer company to take into consideration. I mean, if you're going to lose your USB modem, then maybe you should consider sticking to internet cafes. There are a host of other things that you could lose instead, which would all be much harder to replace than it, and would really be show-stoppers. E.g., your power adaptor, or VGA adaptor. Or the phone cable itself.
I don't see any reason why a person working from the road would really be that much more likely to lose their USB modem than they would any other external component -- and at least you can get a USB modem quickly. If you use an Apple laptop and you lose your power adaptor, you're looking at a hefty chunk of change for a new one.
My work notebook, which is not an Apple (sadly), has its own small travelling infrastructure. Power cable (two parts -- computer to box and box to wall), modem cable, ethernet cable, mouse (because the trackpad sucks), VGA breakout cable, 1/8" M-M audio cable, external floppy drive. This is basically a standard loadout for someone who travels with their primary computer, and less than many people I know (who use external numeric keypads, for instance, or SmartCard readers). Would it be nicer to have all this stuff built-in? Maybe, but at a certain point the thing would be huge, and start looking like a Swiss Army knife. But the important part here is that this thing requires an insane amount of accessories, but people still buy them.
I think Apple took a look around at the competition and realized that people seem to be comfortable with external peripherals; even then, they went and made the lowest-cost and least-used item on the motherboard external. It impacts few users, and its impact on the users that it does effect is minor.
Great use if you happen to have a PCMCIA flash card sitting around (are those things even made anymore?), but to anyone else in that situation, I think the obvious solution would just be to buy a USB floppy drive. Not only can you use it to tranfer files from your 486 laptop (which I'm assuming has a FD built-in or as an external option, unless you lost it), but you can also use it to get anything that somebody might send you in the mail. Not that it's likely to happen very often, but they're handy to have around sometimes. And they're relatively cheap and easily available.