Hmm.. I suppose you have a point there. So dos that mean that 'intent' plays a part in it, as well? IE. if the college kid I alluded to earlier coded this incredibly secure password protection system as a way of hiding his pr0n stash, is it somehow less trustworthy than if the same or equivalent system had been created by a team of corporate programmers to protect a bank's data store? Or am I looking at this the wrong way? (I mean, frankly, if it's about trust, after MS's actions and federal court losses, I wouldn't trust them or their OS's any further than I can throw them.. and I'm sure I can't throw a corporation that big very far at all)
I agree with you on that. As the requirements for EAL4 certification stand right now, it's quite true that Linux would not be able to qualify. However, the reason Linux doesn't qualify shows exactly what the problem is with his argument that Linux is less secure somehow because it doesn't have this certification: Linux is not unable to achieve EAL4 because of a lack of technical merit or actual real world security, it's because of a *technicality*. While documentation of the development process is, I suppose, necesary for closed source operating systems to prove certain standards of programming, the fact that you can actually *look* at the source code in OSS projects lessens the neccesity of this aspect for that type of projects. If I can look at the code and actually see that, for example, the password authentication routines are secure, then does it matter if the actual programming was done by a highly regimented team of programmers using a compartmentalized programming methodology, or a lone college student working from his parents basement while munching cheetos? The resulting code and its security is what matters, not so much the development process used to arrive at this code.
At least, that's *my* humble opinion.:) So here's hoping that the talk of changing the CC process to take OSS principles into account more moves from beyond mere talk to some action.
Hehe.. In your face, Scott McCollum! Put *that* in your narrow little pipe and smoke it!
(and for those of you who dunno who our dear friend Scott is, he's a 'writer' for WorldTechTribune.com makes a habit of writing screed after screed of his anti-Linux and anti-open source opinions (and tries to pass them off as news half the time). I wouldn't hate his guts so much if his arguments made sense, but he just basically sits there spouting nothing but FUD and thinly disguised pro-MS propaganda, and when OSS advocates react with proper indignation to his bull, he has the sheer gall to act all shocked and point at their emails and go 'Look, see, they're attacking me for no reason, it just goes to prove those dirty Open Source hippies are nothing but savages!'. Also, he wrote a couple of articles about how Win2K had gotten this same certification when Linux didn't have it yet, and then he went on to proclaim that Linux would *never* get this certification because it was inherently insecure and flawed, unlike his beloved Win2K. So, from IBM with love, fuck you, Scott McCollum.)
iTunes came out, and I was intrigued, but I saw it in action, and I passed. This came out, and just from reading the blurbs, I'm not even gonna check it out. I'll stick with eMusic. One monthly rate, as many downloads as I want, of good quality music in fairly open, non-DRM'd MP3 formats (I wish they also offered OGG formats, but I guess you can't have everything) that I can burn, copy, time-shift, and move to portable players as many times as I want with no need for special software or additional licenses once it's on my machine. Their donwload software is available for Windows, Mac, *and* Linux.
The only complaint I might have is that their selection can be somewhat limited, in the sense that you won't really find the latest Eminem or Avril Lavinge music, but you *will* find a lot of bands that are really damn good in a whole lot of genres, especially if you're willing to let its built in reccomendation system (like Netflix's) guide you to new stuff you might never had heard of before. These aren't just unknowns or guys taping out of their mom's garage, these are actual artists signed to actual labels. The flat monthly fee no matter how much you donwload is sort of liberating in this sense as well, since you can feel free to download an entire album from someone you never heard of before just to try it out, without worrying about it costing you even a single cent more than your usual monthly fee.
Give it a shot, their 50 song/download trial would be worth nearly $50 on iTunes and a little less on this new service. You don't really have much to lose, and you mgiht surprise yourself by learning to love something new.:)
Also, check out this link for a comparison between iTunes and eMusic: click here.
Ahh.. good to know i'm noty missing out on that much then. I'd pay good money for an email app on my Zaurus that synced well with Outlook, Eudora, Mozilla Mail/Netscape, etc. You know, multiple folders, message threading, message categories/ranks.. I wouldn't even hold out for a Free/OSS version. If theKompany or someone else made a good mail app like that with proper syncing capabilities, I'd pay. I know that Wireless conenctions are all the rage, so I'd be more likely to see an app like MultiMail for the Palm which is a full featured mail client, not a sync client, but where's the love for those of us, like me, who live in parts of the world where wireless hasn't quite caught on yet? I need a good sync solution...:P
I do agree, at least in the sense that it's a bit of a hassle, yes, but the ebook formats that Opie-reader reads are actually the most common ones. And there's a perfectly capable PDF reader for the Zaurus. I read that 'Unix Haters' book on it. However, you're right in that Sharp's Zaurus people would make a major coup if they got at least one of the 'secure' e-book reader distributors to make a reader for the Z. At the very least, they should get the Adobe Reader 6.0 one. I mean, if the damn thing can run on a glorified calculator like the Palm, it can certainly run on a Zaurus.
I love my Zaurus. I've got the 5500, and while the 5600 looks good, I dont' see any real pressing reason to upgrade quite yet (Except for battery life, but that's why I carry a spare battery for mine around). My only real problem is this, though: Email. I use Mozilla. I love Mozilla. And I use the whole suite, including the Mail client, which I have tricked out with a few plugins to handle PGP, encryption, digital signatures, stuff like that (I do a lot of communications where being able to digitally sign and encryt the messages sent is very important). I've got the junk mail filter fully trained and almost nothing gets past it. Point is, I've got it working, and it works very well for me. The only thing I'd like to do would be to sync those emails with my Zaurus, but apparently that's too much to ask. I would love to be able to read my synced emails ont he road, compose replies anywhere and have them be sent off when I get back to the cradle and sync up again. Odd thing is, I can do this with Outlook, a closed, proprietary virus vector. But I can't do that with a secure, open source Mail app like Mozilla. I really don't want to be forced to switch back to what is to me a lesser mail client (Outlook) when I'm so used to Mozilla Mail, but I'd really like to be able to use the email functionality of my Zaurus. That's my only real complaint, and I just figured i'd rant about it here.:)
Lack of e-book support? I read e-books on my Zaurus all the time (I also blog, code, do network troubleshooting for clients, and do image editing on my digicam pics from it as well, but that's beside the point)! Try QTReader (a.k.a Opie-reader), a very full featured ebook reader with auto-scrolling, screen rotation support, Unicode, and more, which will read just about anything, Aportis "Doc", plain text, weasel/ztxt, gzipped text, Plucker compressed html and its own very highly compressed format.
What it *can't* read is proprietary eBook formats, but that's not the Zaurus' fault, it has the neccesary hardware to run it, but the people who make the readers for those formats haven't bothered to make Zaurus versions of their reader programs. It's the same problem as Palm not being able to read some Microsoft Reader formats, and PocketPC's not being able to read certain Palm formats. The problem is not with the Z, but with eBook publishers not releasing their books in formats that are cross-platform readable, and in not releasing readers for their formats for all platforms. But there's still a buttload of eBooks that come in non proprietary formats (and I'm not just talking abotu Project Gutenberg stuff, go check out FictionWise, where a good chunk (I'd say maybe half) of their books are available in unencrypted formats that are easily readable on a Zaurus, real books by real authors.
And on a geekier note, most of their encrypted books are available on Adobe Reader format, which is available for the Palm, and the Zaurus can run a Palm emulator, so, if you're truly hell-bent on reading those on the Zaurus, well.. I don't think I need to spell it out for the Slashdot crowd.:)
I haven't even thought of that game in over a decade! It was one of my favorite games of all time on the C64 (along with M.U.L.E.).. Man, you have no idea how much I regret selling my old C64 when I was young and foolish.:P
I even remember having a GUI for the C64 with windows, mouse(joystick) support, opening different applications from menus, stuff like that, on the C64, long before Windows.. I remember it being called Geo-something, I think. The C64 really was an amazing machine. I miss it.:)
okay, that's a simplistic argument. but for me, at least, it's what's kept me for the longest time from switching fully. And I think that for average everyday user, it'll be a big issue too. I make a living as a programmer (granted, not an *excellent* living, but I pay my bills on time), and I appreciate Linux for its power, flexibility, and openness. I've been isntrumental in my company in getting them to switch to Linux servers, to trying out Linux desktops, to replacing MS Office with OpenOffice wherever it's feasible, and generally spreading the Good Word (tm) of OSS. But when I get home after a day of code slinging, the last thing I want to see for at least a couple of hours is another config line. I want to double-click on something and get straight to fragging, not spend half an hour fighting with WineX and wondering what I configured wrong *this* time. Granted, WineX is making great strides in compatibiltiy, but frankly, it's not there yet. Performance wise, it's horrible in my experience. It's sad when my Athlon XP 2200+ with a GF4 Ti 4200 can barely handle a game under WineX that I know runs fine under Windows on a P3 600Mhz and an old Voodoo card.
Now, I've read the arguments about people saying that windows can be just as hard and user-unfriednly as Linux for configuration things, and, as an MCSE, I can agree.. *however*, the average Windows user never, ever has to deal with those aspects of Windows. Your average windows user clicks on a thing, and a program loads up. That's it. I know people who've used computers for years, consider themselves computer-savvy, and yet they were surprised when I showed them Windows had a Control Panel. The thing is, windows makes it *possible* for someone to use his computer for years without ever having to touch a config file or panel. Linux doesn't. You have to recompile stuff, type in arcane command lines, and edit text config files, just to get a minesweeper clone up and loaded. Give the people true point-and-click, don't force them to configure *anything*. Make it so stuff comes pre-configured.. leave the settings there for those of us who know our sh1t can still tweak the settings, but just leave it tuned to 'well-enough' and it'll be good enough for 90% of the populace. Users want things to Just Work (tm), they want to click 'Next...' through a couple of dialogs and have their apps installed and ready to run. And when something does go wrong, they want to be able to call someone and have them know how to fix it. People don't *want* to learn how computers work! I've seen it myself, day in and day out, in my business, end users don't know, and don't care, and don't *want* to know or care, about how their computer or their programs or their OS works. They just want it to work. Until Linux can give the average user the ability to just boot up and have things working, without forcing them to *understand*, it'll stay behind Windows in adoption. Period. And yes, I know I'm advocating pandering to the lowest common IQ (which seems ot be in the single digits), but that's what sells, and that's what gets people using your OS. If you're not willing to make Linux idiot-proof, or at least idiot-hardened, then don't even bother bitching about how people aren't picking it up fast enough. The vast majority of people are idiots. Linus isn't simple enough for idiots. Windows is. Ergo: the vast majority of people will use windows instead of linux. end of argument.
Please post all flames in an orderly fashion below.
The local DSL monopoly here in Puerto Rico, (PRTCDSL) uses those same modems. I got them pretty early on, and, indeed, the modem was set to 1234. First thing I did was change that to as long and complex a password as I could, especially after I relazied that I could basically go into any other DSL user's Zyxel and not only find out their username and email, but change their internal modem settings, so that, for example, all their ports were blocked, their DNS numbers were wrong, and basically just make their connection unusable. I also urged all my acquaintances who had the service to switch their passwords. nealry 2 years later, PRTCDSL is finally changing this.. the modems now arrive preconfigured with a password that they don't tell their clients. It's pretty much a very closely kept secret inside the company, they don't tell it to anyone. If you want to change any of your DSL settings, you have to call their Tech Support nd have someone do it for you. However, I'm pretty sure that it's the same 'secret' password on *all* the new modems.. so, if someone finds out what that password is and lets it spread, we'll have the same problem as before, except worse, because the home users won't be able to go in and change the passwords themselves'cause they're locked out.
LOL.. I've met lots of canadians online (and a few IRL when I lived in upstate NY), and you all just seem like such nice people overall. Of course, my paranoid american mind just makes me think that you all must be up to something, no one is really *that* nice.:D
I'll just tell myself that I'm going up there to keep tabs on you people and see what you're all really up to.;)
I hear you.. In any case, we're giving the good ol' US of A 2 more years and then we'll see where things stand. I'm going to be moving to NYC later this year with my fiancee so she can finish her Master's over there, and I figure NYC is as good a laboratory as any for seeing where our country is heading in regards to civil rights, fair use, security, and foreign relations. Depending on what we see there, we'll make the decision to stay or leave once she graduates in 2 years. I'm rahter hoping I don't have a reason to still be seriously considering leaving in 2 years.
Or is the rest of the world looking better and better each day in comparison to the USA? You know, 2 years ago I would have never even imagined living anywhere else. But after all the issues that have popped up since 9/11, the steady erosion of civil liberties, the destruction of fair use, the bullying of giant corporations, it's getting harder and harder to love the USA.
Last weekend my fiancee and I were randomly surfing the web after an evening of playing 'Hunter' on our GC (the couple that kills zombies together stays together, we say!), and we ran across the John's Switch to Canada parody of the Apple Switch ads. 2 years ago, it would have been good for a laugh and nothing more. But last weekend, after having ourselves a good laugh, we both found ourselves going "Hmmm... Canada...". I think this is the first time I've ever seriously considered living somewhere, anywhere else than the USA.. and it was even more surprising to me to see my girlfriend, who is not nearly as politcally active/concerned as I've become lately, giving the whole idea of leaving the country some serious consideration as well.
My slightly OT point here is, the more rights that are taken away from us, the less freedom we are given, the more control that is handed over to corporation after corporation.. the harder it gets to love this country. This is just another nail in the coffin. The USA has long stopped being the 'Land of the Free'.
Here's the deal. I know my sh1t. I work as a programmer at a small development house, and we share offices with a small computer repair shop. Even though I'm a software guy with only 4 years of experience in dealing with hardware repair as well, I've learned a lot, and consider myself to be quite knowledgeable. As a matter of fact, I spend a good half of my time helping out the computer repair guys instead of coding because *they keep asing me for help on systems they don't know about*. And these are techs with supposedly over 10 years of experience. So I'm gonna go ahead and claim that I'm a good technician, knowledgeable and able.. however, I only have those 4 years of experience. Later this year, I'm going to be moving, and that's going to require me to quit this job and search for a new one. With just my 4 years of experience, I'm likely to not find anything. *That's* why i'm right now studying for the A+ (frankly, most of this is really basic stuff, anyone with a bit of spare time to study can get an A+ if they buy the right books without even needing to touch a puter), not because *I* beleive it will make me a better tech, but because employers definetly will.
I actually agree with you there. If you don't know anybody, the ease of meeting new people in a massively multiplayer game is a big plus. What I'm saying, though, is that once you have a set group of people you enjoy playing with, at least in my experience, a NWN-type game is a far more enjoyable experience and environ for this type of game than, say, Everquest.
However, I'll grant you that this type of gameplay might not appeal to everyone, for some people, the ability to show off their virtual achievements to a large group, as in having a really high level or truly rare items in an MMORPG, is a big plus, and for that, there's really no substitute. I've personally played more than a few MMORPG's, and the envious stares and/whispers from people admiring Rare Item X or the fact that I'd gotten my char to X level were highly gratifying. But, for all the emphasis on 'multiplayer' in most MMORPG's, I've found that the gameplay is actually a lot more individual, along the lines of 'i'm killing monsters by myself, there just happen to be other people around that are killing monsters too', whereas in NWN you're actually working as a true part of a group for the most part.
In my opinion, it's when you find a group of likeminded players and enter a guild or party of some sort and work together that these games shine. It just so happens that I prefer to have my group/guild/clan/party in a NWN-type setting where we don't have to deal with the bad sides of the whole MMORPG experience and can focus on the cool group stuff.
Seriously, what you're asking for is basically what Neverwinter Nights provides in its multiplayer. Once upon a long time ago, I was seriously hooked on MUSHesand I figured that I'd get seriously into online games such as Everquest. Didn't happen. I was used to being able to *roleplay* in MUSHes, and of being able to set my own time schedules for things, of not having to go around and killing millions of giant rats just to go up a level. In EQ and others, even if you find a party of people to RP with, If you're not there all the time leveling, you quickly get left behind.
Then out comes Neverwinter Nights. Pick up a module, or make your own, get a group of friends together (or make some friends in one of the persistent NWN worlds out there), and boom, you're good to go. You and your group control when the gaming takes place (I play every Thursday with a group of close friends who we all used to play tabletop D&D but in the past few years we've all found ourselves scattered to different parts of the U.S. - this helps us stay together and closer as friends even though we're geographically very far apart), and when you're not playing, the world stays still, ready to be picked up again when you guys get together; you don't get left behind. You've got the good things of online gaming without most of the bad: friendship, camraderie, fun, adventure, without the pk'ing, looting, endless hamster-wheel advancement (sure, you still have to kill monsters to level up normally in NWN, but the person running the module can choose to grant XP for other things at any moment, so you can go up in level faster by RP'ing instead of slaying monsters if that's the type of play you want).
Basically, it's a great online experience that you and your friends control, not some megacompany. And you don't have to pay a monthly fee for it either!:)
Allright, thus ends my rant about how much better NWN is than normal MMORPG's. This is just my opinion though, your mileage may vary.
Well, looks like I'm in. Well, at the very least they told me I qualify to get in. Waiting for the email to le tme know when I can give it a shot. Hopefully soon.:) Really looking forward to being a partof this, it can live up to even half its promise.
Interesting idea, definetly. I like that.:) I'd just like to add, like I added in another response above (feel free to mod me down as redundant for sayign this before, but I just wanted to bring the point up in this discussion as well), a little somehting about those objects and places that we create ourselves. Who will end up owning the rights to those objects? In my opinion, the rights to objects that someone creates in There should belong to that person and that person alone, *especially* if they're paying a monthly fee. Otherwise, another way the company could make money (might not be very popular with the/. crowd, I'm just throwing it out there as an idea) is this:
Charge for content creation. Or, if you want to create the content for free then it belongs to everybody/the company. Think of it in these terms: if you ant to develop a cool new atom smasher but want to keep the results and technology for yourself alone, then you're gonna have to fund the whole thing entirely out of your pocket. If you want the government to pay for your equipment and research, then you have to agree to make the results of your experimejnts public and that any products made belong to the government/public. Duno if my analogy is fully apt, but you see where I'm going, right? Think it would be doable?
Lejade, good luck on your project, would love to take a look at it once you guys are ready to release as well. Whoever manages to make a good 'Metaverse-esque' system first gets my dollar.:) Anyway, if you read my reply to websensei above, you'd see I'm also a little concerned about the release of the API's, I'm just excited about the possibilities of the idea, but it remains to be seen just how open and extensible those API's are. i'm not that concerned about the licensing (I don't really beleive that all non-gnu licenses are evil, but I do support the use of the GPL where appropriate), unless it turns out to be too restrictive, which would kill the whole point of opening up the API's. I'm not sure if a GPL-type license would be ideal for this sort of thing anyway. I'd prefer a license more along the lines of:
'Whatever I make in There is mine and mine alone, unless I explicitly grant others rights to it.'
Notice how I don't include There's parent company in there anywhere. Especially if this ends up being a service we have to pay for, I do beleive that anything we create in There should belong to only us and not the company. That gives you the freedom to release your objects and the code for your objects/places under the GPL if you want to, and gives me the option to keep my code to myself if I don't care for anyone else seeing it (for whatever reasons those may be). That's true freedom in licensing, as far as I'm concerned: the ability to choose your own license, not to be forced to adhere to someone else's license. You are, of course, entitled to your own opinion.:)
Anyway, if they keep those API's reasonably open, and give users the rights to the stuff those users create instead of tryign to keep the rights to everything for themselves, I think it will be very interesting.
As for the financial backing, it's not so much how much money was invested, but more who's doing the investing: these are people who, for the most part, are considered visionaries in the type of technology that this seems to be trying to bring to the masses. These are people with a strong personal interest and stake in this, not just investors hoping to get rich quick from the dot com craze. In today's economy, I don' think these people would have invested that much money if they didn't think there was something special about it.
w00t, I've got one of the developer's family members replying to me!:)
Erm, anyway, yeah, once you look a little deeper into it, it has some depth tere that's pretty unque, and I'm allready excited about the possibilities if it can do what they claim it does. Of course, I allready filled out the form to be a beta tester, crossing my fingers that I get in as I definetly wanna see for myself if it lives up to its potential.
Also, if it's decent, I can point my girlfriend at it so she can have something to do besides the Sims Online, which I bought and am paying for her for X-mas, and which she's allready gotten bored of in the first week and a half of gameplay (and keep in mind this is a woman who owns and has played The Sims and *every* expansion pack for hours almost every day... Sims Online is turning out to be a huge dissapointment).
However, if I'm not mistaken, this looks like it could turn out to be a lot more than just a game. I wonder, though, to appeal to more people, could the engine be modified to, for example, create an area with FPS gameplay? I mean, okay, the world as a whole is non-violent and mostly social. But if I get a piece of 'unreal estate' in There, and it's mine to do with as I wish and program as I like, could I for example create a giant Pong board, or recreate the first level of Wolfenstein 3D and have people running around and shooting each other? IE- My land, my rules? Just wondering how flexible/extensible those API's will really be. And looking forward to seeing how far some of us geeks can push them (if they can get past the whole 'it's just an Everquest/Palace/Ultima Online ripoff!' mentality and see through to the 'ooh, I can code for this!' layer). Also, i've been watching Lain lately, so.. I'm pretty primed for the idea of virtual worlds.;)
Okay, so at first glance this seems like just another chat room/MMORPG/Palace rip-off, with maybe slightly better graphics. But then I started reading into it some more, and I started getting impressed. They're planning to release open API's, anyone can create their own objects and sell/share them, create new parts of There for themselves and other.. once you start doing that, the 'Metaverse' moniker starts to stick. Right now it's cute and sanitized and controlled. But once those API's open up, well.. look what happened to the web. Sure, 90% of it is sanitized commercial crap (or pr0n), but there's all these pockets of individuality flowering through here and there that keep me coming back with a hint of the old promise that first got me hooked during the days that BBS's were cutting edge.
Err.. back to the topic on hand: The exciting thing about this, and what sets it apart from pretty much every other MMORPG/virtual chat out there is that ability to create new parts of the world and have them accessible to others. As people log on and start making that world their own, that's when things get interesting, that's when the whole 'Metaverse' concept starts taking hold. This is the only concept like this I've seen that holds any promise of becoming even partially what we all imagine the 'Metaverse' to be.
As a side note, take a good look at the people who are backing this project. It reads like a who's who of online and gaming celebs in a way. It makes me curious to see how this develops, as I find it hard to believe so many of them would back it to the tune of $33 million if they didn't see a heckuva lot more potential in this than just another virtual chat room.
Turning that argument on its head: what exactly are 'real groups' then? I mean, is the fact that you just happen live in the same general geographical location as the other people in your town and are therefore part of the group 'citizen of town X' merely by being there any more 'golly gee' than the fact that you just happen to be surfing Yahoo at the same time as x amount of other people, therefore becoming part of the group 'Yahoo surfers'? How exactly is the group 'my family' more real than the group 'people who are surfing Porn.com', since in both cases it's purely random chance that you were born into your family, or that you are writing down how hot 'Porn Star X' in the forums at Pron.com at the same time as others browse the same site? Just something to think of, our definition of which groups are more 'real' than others.
Of course, the argument can be made that certain groups, such as citizenship and family, are more 'real' because there is greater interaction among its members, while in the case of people surfing the same site, they're barely, if at all, aware of each other. But when you factor in a project like this one, where suddenly people are being made aware of the others on the websites they're on, then those groups start gaining a real legitimacy that's intriguing to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm.. I suppose you have a point there. So dos that mean that 'intent' plays a part in it, as well? IE. if the college kid I alluded to earlier coded this incredibly secure password protection system as a way of hiding his pr0n stash, is it somehow less trustworthy than if the same or equivalent system had been created by a team of corporate programmers to protect a bank's data store? Or am I looking at this the wrong way? (I mean, frankly, if it's about trust, after MS's actions and federal court losses, I wouldn't trust them or their OS's any further than I can throw them.. and I'm sure I can't throw a corporation that big very far at all)
I agree with you on that. As the requirements for EAL4 certification stand right now, it's quite true that Linux would not be able to qualify. However, the reason Linux doesn't qualify shows exactly what the problem is with his argument that Linux is less secure somehow because it doesn't have this certification: Linux is not unable to achieve EAL4 because of a lack of technical merit or actual real world security, it's because of a *technicality*. While documentation of the development process is, I suppose, necesary for closed source operating systems to prove certain standards of programming, the fact that you can actually *look* at the source code in OSS projects lessens the neccesity of this aspect for that type of projects. If I can look at the code and actually see that, for example, the password authentication routines are secure, then does it matter if the actual programming was done by a highly regimented team of programmers using a compartmentalized programming methodology, or a lone college student working from his parents basement while munching cheetos? The resulting code and its security is what matters, not so much the development process used to arrive at this code.
:) So here's hoping that the talk of changing the CC process to take OSS principles into account more moves from beyond mere talk to some action.
At least, that's *my* humble opinion.
Hehe.. In your face, Scott McCollum! Put *that* in your narrow little pipe and smoke it!
(and for those of you who dunno who our dear friend Scott is, he's a 'writer' for WorldTechTribune.com makes a habit of writing screed after screed of his anti-Linux and anti-open source opinions (and tries to pass them off as news half the time). I wouldn't hate his guts so much if his arguments made sense, but he just basically sits there spouting nothing but FUD and thinly disguised pro-MS propaganda, and when OSS advocates react with proper indignation to his bull, he has the sheer gall to act all shocked and point at their emails and go 'Look, see, they're attacking me for no reason, it just goes to prove those dirty Open Source hippies are nothing but savages!'. Also, he wrote a couple of articles about how Win2K had gotten this same certification when Linux didn't have it yet, and then he went on to proclaim that Linux would *never* get this certification because it was inherently insecure and flawed, unlike his beloved Win2K. So, from IBM with love, fuck you, Scott McCollum.)
iTunes came out, and I was intrigued, but I saw it in action, and I passed. This came out, and just from reading the blurbs, I'm not even gonna check it out. I'll stick with eMusic. One monthly rate, as many downloads as I want, of good quality music in fairly open, non-DRM'd MP3 formats (I wish they also offered OGG formats, but I guess you can't have everything) that I can burn, copy, time-shift, and move to portable players as many times as I want with no need for special software or additional licenses once it's on my machine. Their donwload software is available for Windows, Mac, *and* Linux.
:)
The only complaint I might have is that their selection can be somewhat limited, in the sense that you won't really find the latest Eminem or Avril Lavinge music, but you *will* find a lot of bands that are really damn good in a whole lot of genres, especially if you're willing to let its built in reccomendation system (like Netflix's) guide you to new stuff you might never had heard of before. These aren't just unknowns or guys taping out of their mom's garage, these are actual artists signed to actual labels. The flat monthly fee no matter how much you donwload is sort of liberating in this sense as well, since you can feel free to download an entire album from someone you never heard of before just to try it out, without worrying about it costing you even a single cent more than your usual monthly fee.
Give it a shot, their 50 song/download trial would be worth nearly $50 on iTunes and a little less on this new service. You don't really have much to lose, and you mgiht surprise yourself by learning to love something new.
Also, check out this link for a comparison between iTunes and eMusic: click here.
Let me help you out here: Normal to 733t5p34k translator.
Ahh.. good to know i'm noty missing out on that much then. I'd pay good money for an email app on my Zaurus that synced well with Outlook, Eudora, Mozilla Mail/Netscape, etc. You know, multiple folders, message threading, message categories/ranks.. I wouldn't even hold out for a Free/OSS version. If theKompany or someone else made a good mail app like that with proper syncing capabilities, I'd pay. I know that Wireless conenctions are all the rage, so I'd be more likely to see an app like MultiMail for the Palm which is a full featured mail client, not a sync client, but where's the love for those of us, like me, who live in parts of the world where wireless hasn't quite caught on yet? I need a good sync solution... :P
I do agree, at least in the sense that it's a bit of a hassle, yes, but the ebook formats that Opie-reader reads are actually the most common ones. And there's a perfectly capable PDF reader for the Zaurus. I read that 'Unix Haters' book on it. However, you're right in that Sharp's Zaurus people would make a major coup if they got at least one of the 'secure' e-book reader distributors to make a reader for the Z. At the very least, they should get the Adobe Reader 6.0 one. I mean, if the damn thing can run on a glorified calculator like the Palm, it can certainly run on a Zaurus.
I love my Zaurus. I've got the 5500, and while the 5600 looks good, I dont' see any real pressing reason to upgrade quite yet (Except for battery life, but that's why I carry a spare battery for mine around). My only real problem is this, though: Email. I use Mozilla. I love Mozilla. And I use the whole suite, including the Mail client, which I have tricked out with a few plugins to handle PGP, encryption, digital signatures, stuff like that (I do a lot of communications where being able to digitally sign and encryt the messages sent is very important). I've got the junk mail filter fully trained and almost nothing gets past it. Point is, I've got it working, and it works very well for me. The only thing I'd like to do would be to sync those emails with my Zaurus, but apparently that's too much to ask. I would love to be able to read my synced emails ont he road, compose replies anywhere and have them be sent off when I get back to the cradle and sync up again. Odd thing is, I can do this with Outlook, a closed, proprietary virus vector. But I can't do that with a secure, open source Mail app like Mozilla. I really don't want to be forced to switch back to what is to me a lesser mail client (Outlook) when I'm so used to Mozilla Mail, but I'd really like to be able to use the email functionality of my Zaurus. That's my only real complaint, and I just figured i'd rant about it here. :)
Lack of e-book support? I read e-books on my Zaurus all the time (I also blog, code, do network troubleshooting for clients, and do image editing on my digicam pics from it as well, but that's beside the point)! Try QTReader (a.k.a Opie-reader), a very full featured ebook reader with auto-scrolling, screen rotation support, Unicode, and more, which will read just about anything, Aportis "Doc", plain text, weasel/ztxt, gzipped text, Plucker compressed html and its own very highly compressed format.
:)
What it *can't* read is proprietary eBook formats, but that's not the Zaurus' fault, it has the neccesary hardware to run it, but the people who make the readers for those formats haven't bothered to make Zaurus versions of their reader programs. It's the same problem as Palm not being able to read some Microsoft Reader formats, and PocketPC's not being able to read certain Palm formats. The problem is not with the Z, but with eBook publishers not releasing their books in formats that are cross-platform readable, and in not releasing readers for their formats for all platforms. But there's still a buttload of eBooks that come in non proprietary formats (and I'm not just talking abotu Project Gutenberg stuff, go check out FictionWise, where a good chunk (I'd say maybe half) of their books are available in unencrypted formats that are easily readable on a Zaurus, real books by real authors.
And on a geekier note, most of their encrypted books are available on Adobe Reader format, which is available for the Palm, and the Zaurus can run a Palm emulator, so, if you're truly hell-bent on reading those on the Zaurus, well.. I don't think I need to spell it out for the Slashdot crowd.
Mail Order Monsters!!!!
:P
:)
I haven't even thought of that game in over a decade! It was one of my favorite games of all time on the C64 (along with M.U.L.E.).. Man, you have no idea how much I regret selling my old C64 when I was young and foolish.
I even remember having a GUI for the C64 with windows, mouse(joystick) support, opening different applications from menus, stuff like that, on the C64, long before Windows.. I remember it being called Geo-something, I think. The C64 really was an amazing machine. I miss it.
Not that long.. should give me just barely enough time to save up for them so I can afford them as soon as they come out. :)
Early adopters forever! w00t!
okay, that's a simplistic argument. but for me, at least, it's what's kept me for the longest time from switching fully. And I think that for average everyday user, it'll be a big issue too. I make a living as a programmer (granted, not an *excellent* living, but I pay my bills on time), and I appreciate Linux for its power, flexibility, and openness. I've been isntrumental in my company in getting them to switch to Linux servers, to trying out Linux desktops, to replacing MS Office with OpenOffice wherever it's feasible, and generally spreading the Good Word (tm) of OSS. But when I get home after a day of code slinging, the last thing I want to see for at least a couple of hours is another config line. I want to double-click on something and get straight to fragging, not spend half an hour fighting with WineX and wondering what I configured wrong *this* time. Granted, WineX is making great strides in compatibiltiy, but frankly, it's not there yet. Performance wise, it's horrible in my experience. It's sad when my Athlon XP 2200+ with a GF4 Ti 4200 can barely handle a game under WineX that I know runs fine under Windows on a P3 600Mhz and an old Voodoo card.
Now, I've read the arguments about people saying that windows can be just as hard and user-unfriednly as Linux for configuration things, and, as an MCSE, I can agree.. *however*, the average Windows user never, ever has to deal with those aspects of Windows. Your average windows user clicks on a thing, and a program loads up. That's it. I know people who've used computers for years, consider themselves computer-savvy, and yet they were surprised when I showed them Windows had a Control Panel. The thing is, windows makes it *possible* for someone to use his computer for years without ever having to touch a config file or panel. Linux doesn't. You have to recompile stuff, type in arcane command lines, and edit text config files, just to get a minesweeper clone up and loaded. Give the people true point-and-click, don't force them to configure *anything*. Make it so stuff comes pre-configured.. leave the settings there for those of us who know our sh1t can still tweak the settings, but just leave it tuned to 'well-enough' and it'll be good enough for 90% of the populace. Users want things to Just Work (tm), they want to click 'Next...' through a couple of dialogs and have their apps installed and ready to run. And when something does go wrong, they want to be able to call someone and have them know how to fix it. People don't *want* to learn how computers work! I've seen it myself, day in and day out, in my business, end users don't know, and don't care, and don't *want* to know or care, about how their computer or their programs or their OS works. They just want it to work. Until Linux can give the average user the ability to just boot up and have things working, without forcing them to *understand*, it'll stay behind Windows in adoption. Period. And yes, I know I'm advocating pandering to the lowest common IQ (which seems ot be in the single digits), but that's what sells, and that's what gets people using your OS. If you're not willing to make Linux idiot-proof, or at least idiot-hardened, then don't even bother bitching about how people aren't picking it up fast enough. The vast majority of people are idiots. Linus isn't simple enough for idiots. Windows is. Ergo: the vast majority of people will use windows instead of linux. end of argument.
Please post all flames in an orderly fashion below.
The local DSL monopoly here in Puerto Rico, (PRTCDSL) uses those same modems. I got them pretty early on, and, indeed, the modem was set to 1234. First thing I did was change that to as long and complex a password as I could, especially after I relazied that I could basically go into any other DSL user's Zyxel and not only find out their username and email, but change their internal modem settings, so that, for example, all their ports were blocked, their DNS numbers were wrong, and basically just make their connection unusable. I also urged all my acquaintances who had the service to switch their passwords. nealry 2 years later, PRTCDSL is finally changing this.. the modems now arrive preconfigured with a password that they don't tell their clients. It's pretty much a very closely kept secret inside the company, they don't tell it to anyone. If you want to change any of your DSL settings, you have to call their Tech Support nd have someone do it for you. However, I'm pretty sure that it's the same 'secret' password on *all* the new modems.. so, if someone finds out what that password is and lets it spread, we'll have the same problem as before, except worse, because the home users won't be able to go in and change the passwords themselves'cause they're locked out.
LOL.. I've met lots of canadians online (and a few IRL when I lived in upstate NY), and you all just seem like such nice people overall. Of course, my paranoid american mind just makes me think that you all must be up to something, no one is really *that* nice. :D
;)
I'll just tell myself that I'm going up there to keep tabs on you people and see what you're all really up to.
I hear you.. In any case, we're giving the good ol' US of A 2 more years and then we'll see where things stand. I'm going to be moving to NYC later this year with my fiancee so she can finish her Master's over there, and I figure NYC is as good a laboratory as any for seeing where our country is heading in regards to civil rights, fair use, security, and foreign relations. Depending on what we see there, we'll make the decision to stay or leave once she graduates in 2 years. I'm rahter hoping I don't have a reason to still be seriously considering leaving in 2 years.
Or is the rest of the world looking better and better each day in comparison to the USA? You know, 2 years ago I would have never even imagined living anywhere else. But after all the issues that have popped up since 9/11, the steady erosion of civil liberties, the destruction of fair use, the bullying of giant corporations, it's getting harder and harder to love the USA.
Last weekend my fiancee and I were randomly surfing the web after an evening of playing 'Hunter' on our GC (the couple that kills zombies together stays together, we say!), and we ran across the John's Switch to Canada parody of the Apple Switch ads. 2 years ago, it would have been good for a laugh and nothing more. But last weekend, after having ourselves a good laugh, we both found ourselves going "Hmmm... Canada...". I think this is the first time I've ever seriously considered living somewhere, anywhere else than the USA.. and it was even more surprising to me to see my girlfriend, who is not nearly as politcally active/concerned as I've become lately, giving the whole idea of leaving the country some serious consideration as well.
My slightly OT point here is, the more rights that are taken away from us, the less freedom we are given, the more control that is handed over to corporation after corporation.. the harder it gets to love this country. This is just another nail in the coffin. The USA has long stopped being the 'Land of the Free'.
Here's the deal. I know my sh1t. I work as a programmer at a small development house, and we share offices with a small computer repair shop. Even though I'm a software guy with only 4 years of experience in dealing with hardware repair as well, I've learned a lot, and consider myself to be quite knowledgeable. As a matter of fact, I spend a good half of my time helping out the computer repair guys instead of coding because *they keep asing me for help on systems they don't know about*. And these are techs with supposedly over 10 years of experience. So I'm gonna go ahead and claim that I'm a good technician, knowledgeable and able.. however, I only have those 4 years of experience. Later this year, I'm going to be moving, and that's going to require me to quit this job and search for a new one. With just my 4 years of experience, I'm likely to not find anything. *That's* why i'm right now studying for the A+ (frankly, most of this is really basic stuff, anyone with a bit of spare time to study can get an A+ if they buy the right books without even needing to touch a puter), not because *I* beleive it will make me a better tech, but because employers definetly will.
I actually agree with you there. If you don't know anybody, the ease of meeting new people in a massively multiplayer game is a big plus. What I'm saying, though, is that once you have a set group of people you enjoy playing with, at least in my experience, a NWN-type game is a far more enjoyable experience and environ for this type of game than, say, Everquest.
/whispers from people admiring Rare Item X or the fact that I'd gotten my char to X level were highly gratifying. But, for all the emphasis on 'multiplayer' in most MMORPG's, I've found that the gameplay is actually a lot more individual, along the lines of 'i'm killing monsters by myself, there just happen to be other people around that are killing monsters too', whereas in NWN you're actually working as a true part of a group for the most part.
However, I'll grant you that this type of gameplay might not appeal to everyone, for some people, the ability to show off their virtual achievements to a large group, as in having a really high level or truly rare items in an MMORPG, is a big plus, and for that, there's really no substitute. I've personally played more than a few MMORPG's, and the envious stares and
In my opinion, it's when you find a group of likeminded players and enter a guild or party of some sort and work together that these games shine. It just so happens that I prefer to have my group/guild/clan/party in a NWN-type setting where we don't have to deal with the bad sides of the whole MMORPG experience and can focus on the cool group stuff.
Seriously, what you're asking for is basically what Neverwinter Nights provides in its multiplayer. Once upon a long time ago, I was seriously hooked on MUSHesand I figured that I'd get seriously into online games such as Everquest. Didn't happen. I was used to being able to *roleplay* in MUSHes, and of being able to set my own time schedules for things, of not having to go around and killing millions of giant rats just to go up a level. In EQ and others, even if you find a party of people to RP with, If you're not there all the time leveling, you quickly get left behind.
:)
Then out comes Neverwinter Nights. Pick up a module, or make your own, get a group of friends together (or make some friends in one of the persistent NWN worlds out there), and boom, you're good to go. You and your group control when the gaming takes place (I play every Thursday with a group of close friends who we all used to play tabletop D&D but in the past few years we've all found ourselves scattered to different parts of the U.S. - this helps us stay together and closer as friends even though we're geographically very far apart), and when you're not playing, the world stays still, ready to be picked up again when you guys get together; you don't get left behind. You've got the good things of online gaming without most of the bad: friendship, camraderie, fun, adventure, without the pk'ing, looting, endless hamster-wheel advancement (sure, you still have to kill monsters to level up normally in NWN, but the person running the module can choose to grant XP for other things at any moment, so you can go up in level faster by RP'ing instead of slaying monsters if that's the type of play you want).
Basically, it's a great online experience that you and your friends control, not some megacompany. And you don't have to pay a monthly fee for it either!
Allright, thus ends my rant about how much better NWN is than normal MMORPG's. This is just my opinion though, your mileage may vary.
w00t!
:) Really looking forward to being a partof this, it can live up to even half its promise.
Well, looks like I'm in. Well, at the very least they told me I qualify to get in. Waiting for the email to le tme know when I can give it a shot. Hopefully soon.
Interesting idea, definetly. I like that. :) I'd just like to add, like I added in another response above (feel free to mod me down as redundant for sayign this before, but I just wanted to bring the point up in this discussion as well), a little somehting about those objects and places that we create ourselves. Who will end up owning the rights to those objects? In my opinion, the rights to objects that someone creates in There should belong to that person and that person alone, *especially* if they're paying a monthly fee. Otherwise, another way the company could make money (might not be very popular with the /. crowd, I'm just throwing it out there as an idea) is this:
Charge for content creation. Or, if you want to create the content for free then it belongs to everybody/the company. Think of it in these terms: if you ant to develop a cool new atom smasher but want to keep the results and technology for yourself alone, then you're gonna have to fund the whole thing entirely out of your pocket. If you want the government to pay for your equipment and research, then you have to agree to make the results of your experimejnts public and that any products made belong to the government/public. Duno if my analogy is fully apt, but you see where I'm going, right? Think it would be doable?
Lejade, good luck on your project, would love to take a look at it once you guys are ready to release as well. Whoever manages to make a good 'Metaverse-esque' system first gets my dollar. :) Anyway, if you read my reply to websensei above, you'd see I'm also a little concerned about the release of the API's, I'm just excited about the possibilities of the idea, but it remains to be seen just how open and extensible those API's are. i'm not that concerned about the licensing (I don't really beleive that all non-gnu licenses are evil, but I do support the use of the GPL where appropriate), unless it turns out to be too restrictive, which would kill the whole point of opening up the API's. I'm not sure if a GPL-type license would be ideal for this sort of thing anyway. I'd prefer a license more along the lines of:
:)
'Whatever I make in There is mine and mine alone, unless I explicitly grant others rights to it.'
Notice how I don't include There's parent company in there anywhere. Especially if this ends up being a service we have to pay for, I do beleive that anything we create in There should belong to only us and not the company. That gives you the freedom to release your objects and the code for your objects/places under the GPL if you want to, and gives me the option to keep my code to myself if I don't care for anyone else seeing it (for whatever reasons those may be). That's true freedom in licensing, as far as I'm concerned: the ability to choose your own license, not to be forced to adhere to someone else's license. You are, of course, entitled to your own opinion.
Anyway, if they keep those API's reasonably open, and give users the rights to the stuff those users create instead of tryign to keep the rights to everything for themselves, I think it will be very interesting.
As for the financial backing, it's not so much how much money was invested, but more who's doing the investing: these are people who, for the most part, are considered visionaries in the type of technology that this seems to be trying to bring to the masses. These are people with a strong personal interest and stake in this, not just investors hoping to get rich quick from the dot com craze. In today's economy, I don' think these people would have invested that much money if they didn't think there was something special about it.
w00t, I've got one of the developer's family members replying to me! :)
;)
Erm, anyway, yeah, once you look a little deeper into it, it has some depth tere that's pretty unque, and I'm allready excited about the possibilities if it can do what they claim it does. Of course, I allready filled out the form to be a beta tester, crossing my fingers that I get in as I definetly wanna see for myself if it lives up to its potential.
Also, if it's decent, I can point my girlfriend at it so she can have something to do besides the Sims Online, which I bought and am paying for her for X-mas, and which she's allready gotten bored of in the first week and a half of gameplay (and keep in mind this is a woman who owns and has played The Sims and *every* expansion pack for hours almost every day... Sims Online is turning out to be a huge dissapointment).
However, if I'm not mistaken, this looks like it could turn out to be a lot more than just a game. I wonder, though, to appeal to more people, could the engine be modified to, for example, create an area with FPS gameplay? I mean, okay, the world as a whole is non-violent and mostly social. But if I get a piece of 'unreal estate' in There, and it's mine to do with as I wish and program as I like, could I for example create a giant Pong board, or recreate the first level of Wolfenstein 3D and have people running around and shooting each other? IE- My land, my rules? Just wondering how flexible/extensible those API's will really be. And looking forward to seeing how far some of us geeks can push them (if they can get past the whole 'it's just an Everquest/Palace/Ultima Online ripoff!' mentality and see through to the 'ooh, I can code for this!' layer). Also, i've been watching Lain lately, so.. I'm pretty primed for the idea of virtual worlds.
Okay, so at first glance this seems like just another chat room/MMORPG/Palace rip-off, with maybe slightly better graphics. But then I started reading into it some more, and I started getting impressed. They're planning to release open API's, anyone can create their own objects and sell/share them, create new parts of There for themselves and other.. once you start doing that, the 'Metaverse' moniker starts to stick. Right now it's cute and sanitized and controlled. But once those API's open up, well.. look what happened to the web. Sure, 90% of it is sanitized commercial crap (or pr0n), but there's all these pockets of individuality flowering through here and there that keep me coming back with a hint of the old promise that first got me hooked during the days that BBS's were cutting edge.
Err.. back to the topic on hand: The exciting thing about this, and what sets it apart from pretty much every other MMORPG/virtual chat out there is that ability to create new parts of the world and have them accessible to others. As people log on and start making that world their own, that's when things get interesting, that's when the whole 'Metaverse' concept starts taking hold. This is the only concept like this I've seen that holds any promise of becoming even partially what we all imagine the 'Metaverse' to be.
As a side note, take a good look at the people who are backing this project. It reads like a who's who of online and gaming celebs in a way. It makes me curious to see how this develops, as I find it hard to believe so many of them would back it to the tune of $33 million if they didn't see a heckuva lot more potential in this than just another virtual chat room.
Turning that argument on its head: what exactly are 'real groups' then? I mean, is the fact that you just happen live in the same general geographical location as the other people in your town and are therefore part of the group 'citizen of town X' merely by being there any more 'golly gee' than the fact that you just happen to be surfing Yahoo at the same time as x amount of other people, therefore becoming part of the group 'Yahoo surfers'? How exactly is the group 'my family' more real than the group 'people who are surfing Porn.com', since in both cases it's purely random chance that you were born into your family, or that you are writing down how hot 'Porn Star X' in the forums at Pron.com at the same time as others browse the same site? Just something to think of, our definition of which groups are more 'real' than others.
Of course, the argument can be made that certain groups, such as citizenship and family, are more 'real' because there is greater interaction among its members, while in the case of people surfing the same site, they're barely, if at all, aware of each other. But when you factor in a project like this one, where suddenly people are being made aware of the others on the websites they're on, then those groups start gaining a real legitimacy that's intriguing to watch.