Many of the posters here were quick to point the finger at Microsoft for their perceived lack of quality. However, regardless of what you think about the relative quality of Microsoft's products one must concede that Windows gets the vast majority of the attention from virus writers, crackers, and other malcontents. It is not fair, for example, to conclude from these attacks alone that an alternative operating system, such as Linux or MacOS, would be more secure if it were placed in a similar market position (most popular OS run by 90%+ users out there). There could be many holes in the alternative operating system just waiting to be exposed when the previously mentioned malcontents turn their full efforts and attention to the new arrival in the number one slot. I am not trying to suggest that Windows is the best choice available, but I submit that one cannot draw a well founded conclusion about the relative quality or security of an operating system until it too has been in the hot seat and faced the brunt of the attackers' efforts over a period of years.
This brings me to my overall question: is the censorship that real, that hard to get around, and how do you do it? What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?
Bear in mind that any breach of the law in China will likely land you in a dingy prison cell for 10 years while they get around to hearing the case, followed by your 10 minute trial (guilty verdict for subversion already stamped and ready to go), and finishing with your 10 years of hard labor in one of their people's work camps. I suggested that you stay here in the United States unless you were born in China and still have family there. I don't know about you, but the only way that I would want to see China is in uniform looking through a gun sight.
I am not looking forward to using two thin putty knives to open my brand new machine though. Why couldn't they have just made it user serviceable for RAM?
The Apple Corporation and Steve Jobs in particular seem to have some sort of obsessive compulsive fetish about hermetically sealed devices that users cannot open easily for upgrades or repairs. I don't know about other people, but for me this has been a major factor in my decision NOT to purchase Apple products over the years. Now, before the Mac Zealots mod me down as flamebait, I will concede that not ALL of Apple's products are like this, but many of them are and I am simply suggesting that using screws instead of glue would be an inexpensive way for Apple to improve their reception among current PC users who may be considering a switch.
I am both an American computer science graduate and a software engineer so I will attempt to explain to you why some of us, but most assuredly not all of us, are reluctant to look at Linux in our careers.
1. People can say what they want about Microsoft, but at the end of the day, from the developer's prospective, 85-95% of the jobs currently available (and that is being generous to Linux) involve Microsoft in some capacity. Thus, for many of us who have bills to pay each month and families to feed the decision to pursue the Microsoft route after college was purely a pragmatic one.
2. Despite the bad press that Microsoft often gets in the Linux community they treat their developers very well. The Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) is actively and extensively supported by Microsoft with continually updated content including technical documentation, articles, code samples, and developer blogs from internal Microsoft product teams. The other thing that Microsoft has going for them is Visual Studio which pretty much sets the standard by which all other IDEs out there are measured. Visual Studio is the best development environment available because Microsoft spends the money necessary to make sure that it is the best development environment available.
Having said these things I would like to point out that I like Linux as well and I hope that the Mono and/or DotGNU projects succeed in their CLR and.NET Framework Library support. However, if people in the Linux community want more people and developers to look at Linux then they should work on convincing large companies to employ more Linux developers. It is good to see IBM putting real money into expanding the market for Linux, someone needed to blaze that trail and IBM has the resources to do it.
Even while Bush gives his oath of office this Thursday for his second term the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and their Democratic allies in Washington are already lining up to gut the necessary changes to the Social Security System (the Republicans do not have enough votes in the senate to break a filibuster). The system is desperately in need of reforms to limit government borrowing from the Social Security Trust Fund and to institute private accounts. Those people who assert that the system needs no reform are being disingenuous at best. If you ask any actuary for an analysis of the social security trust fund he will tell you that we need to act soon or we may be too late to prevent the inevitable collapse should the system remain as it is today. The main problem is this: the senior citizens collectively form one of the most powerful special interest groups in the country and their interest is to maximize the amount of their monthly benefit checks, even though they will already received hundreds and perhaps thousands of times the amount that they paid into the system. Many of them are extremely militant about this after all they are "entitled" or so they have been lead to believe. It is actually not surprising that this is the case, these are not greedy people per se, but for many of them social security is all that they have left. The baby boomers especially were remarkably unsophisticated when it came to planning for their own retirements and if political history has shown anything it has show that a measure which robs from Peter to pay Paul will always have the support of Paul. Now if you are young person, and especially if you are young Democrat then listen up, the senior citizens in this country and Democrats in congress are lining up to preserve their low interest access to loans from the Social Security Trust fund AND to raise your payroll taxes over the next ten years by perhaps 50%. There is no other way that two workers can support one retiree under their plan, no benefit cuts and no age minimum increases, unless they massively hike taxes. Even if you invested all of your private account in treasury bonds you would still do better than ZERO percent interest on your money under the current system. The source of money would even be the same, the government, but the Democrats don't want that because then they would have to pay you interest to borrow your retirement money and spend it. If you are young person and you want your money to be there when it is your turn then get on board with the private accounts. The parents of the baby boomers told them the same things, or didn't tell them, about social security fifty years ago, that there was no problem and that everything would be fine, because by the time their children figured out the truth they would be too dead to care. Don't let it come to that again.
you are taking the example too literally and have obviously missed the point. The point is that people generally want to do the minimum amount of work required to achieve their desired result. This provides a powerful disincentive for people to take up challenging professions in a society where the rewards are no greater for those who succeed at the challenging profession. Ask anyone who has actually lived under a communist system and they will tell you that working without incentive and without hope for improving your life or the life your family (no matter how hard you work or how well you perform) is no way to live.
The problem with public ownership, as Mr. Gates so aptly put it, is that it removes the incentive for individuals to improve that which is pubically owned. The individual in the communist society is going to say, "Why should I go to school and learn to program when I will receive nothing more than what the garbage man gets in compensation?" At the end of the day the only things that get us out of bed in the morning to do economically productive work are incentives and the most powerful incentive of all is money. Sure, there might be the occaisonal altruistic soul who creates purely for the joy of creation itself, but unfortunately for most of us, the mortage really is due at the end of the month, our children really do need to be fed, and people really do want to make life better for their families. One cannot do any of these things effectively in a society without incentives...it just doesn't work, just ask anyone who lived in the Russia during the Soviet era.
If I invent the next Chia pet in my basement, they'll own it. And I know a lot of companies are like this, presumably because they can get away with it.
Lawyers and their corporate masters usually get carried away with the language that they use in their contracts. It is sort of like used car salesmen, they price the car way high, not because they think that they can actually sell it for that amount, but because they know that you will haggle them down to the price which is actually reasonable. The goal in contract law is to be as broad as possible without being blatantly illegal, but particularly onerous clauses, especially in non-compete agreements and other employee/employer contracts are frequently not enforceable. In other words what they can make you sign and what they can actually enforce in court are two different things. The only problem is that it may cost you a lot to find out that you are right and they know that.
Nakamura should have really gone and formed his own company if he truly developed this idea on his own.
That can be risky because your original employer can come back after you are successful and sue for damages, royalties, etc...unless you can prove that you had idea AFTER you were no longer employed by them (especially difficult if the patent is in the same field as the company's business). Otherwise, the assumption is that you quit so that you could develop it on your own without giving them their cut.
In the words of Dilbert, "How about I trade you my joy of technical achievement for your raise and bonus?"
The joy of achievement alone may be enough wherever this guy lives (la la land maybe?), but here in the real world we take cash on the barrel head...accept no substitutes.
Not really, 8 million is a pittance compared to the revenues that Nichia Corporation realizes ( approximately 1.4 billion dollars) every year because of Mr. Nakamura's invention. They should have offered him at least $100 million in stock and/or bonuses.
they are going to begin denying updates to those people not running at least Windows XP SP1 because of all the pirated installations of pre-sp1 Windows XP Pro out there (corporate keys fiasco).
Many apartment dwellers have problems getting their own roommates to pay their share of the base rent and now you want to throw in a shared T1 expense? That is just asking for trouble when the rent (on the T1 line) comes due.
Does this include their patent for their
Jet Powered Surfboard? If I remember correctly they bought this one just so they could display it in their collection of obscure and unusual patents.
This is absolutely correct. The thing that I do not understand is this. The electronics, computer hardware, and software industry (collectively the technology industry), when considered globally, is a trillion dollar industry. The consumers don't want DRM, they have made that preference loud and clear in the marketplace thus far. The entertainment and content industry is maybe 100 billion dollars per year world wide (and that is being generous). So why don't the technology companies band together, give the consumers what they want, increase their revenues and tell Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA, etc to piss up the proverbial f***ing rope?
Market Saturation
on
Wish Cancelled
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· Score: 3, Insightful
There are far too many MMORPGs these days because every small startup game company and their publishers and investors were rushing to jump on the bandwagon. The trouble with these types of games is that they put such demands upon a player's time that he or she rarely has time for more than one MMORPG addiction. That combined with the fact that MMORPGs are not yet and probably never will be (due to the aforementioned time constraints) part of the mainstream. The end result of all of this is too many MMORPGs chasing too few players and therefore too few dollars. What do investors do when a company is hemorrhaging money like an arterial bleeder? They pull the plug and it appears that that is exactly what happened here.
Some of the things that these people do in those computer labs are absolutely hysterical. Do they even know that they are being watched? To bad that most of the girls that one finds in the computer labs are of the decidedly more nerdy variety.
How come Cocaine comes from the Catholic countries anyway? You won't see Iran manufacturing it anytime soon.
That's because cocaine doesn't grow very well in the Middle East. They grow opium poppies instead and supply the raw materials for the heroin trade in Europe and the United States. If the Iranian people truley wish to condemn terrorism then they need to start putting their money where their mouth is and not into the pockets of the terrorists. Iran is a state sponsor of terrorist organizations and if they continue funding radical madrassas, granting safe haven to terrorists, and sponsoring terrorist groups, then it is only a matter of time before they force another major confrontation with the west. They have sowed the wind with their support of terrorism and if they continue with their present policies then they will reap the whirlwind of our swift and sure response.
THe problem is a political one and we need a political answer. The people of Iran need to make it heard that they want blogs and such. Only they can secure their own freedoms. The best thing that we as a free people can do is offer assistance in helping their government learn that free speach is good.
You forget that Iran is a theocracy run by religious fanatics. The ruling council of ayatollahs is the real power in Iran. The parliament is simply there to rubber stamp their edicts and handle the trivial matters. The Iranian people either agree with everything that the ayatollahs do and say (the minority) or they are too afraid to speak out for fear of their lives. Would you speak out against the government when the punishment was indefinite imprisonment, the amputation of limbs, or death? The only way to liberate people caught in the grip of repressive tyranny is by force, it is the only language that ayatollahs, communist party chairmen, and dictators understand and respect. If you believe that the ayatollahs give a damn about what the people want or free speech then you are living in fantasy land. The real world, especially outside of the United States, is far uglier and nastier than most Americans either know or are willing to believe.
Are there not companies which specialize in manufacturing the chip designs of other client companies? Why couldn't Transmeta design their chips, license their intellectual property, and then have their chips manufactured by one of these fabrication companies. I am no expert on the microprocessor industry, but I have heard it said that a large percentage of operating costs go towards running those expensive fabrication plants.
Perhaps if this project lasts long enough they will turn it over to the open source community when their funding runs out? Then we could have polls on slashdot to decide which features get added to the rovers software or which rock it visits next.
Re:Exactly the problem that a lot of people have
on
Does Linux Have Game?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm a system admin, not a programmer
Well then you are in luck because I am a programmer and will endeavor to answer your question.
The problem with translation of calls is that there is no binary compatibility between DirectX library calls which use the dynamic link library (dll) and the Linux kernel by which the calls and their returns could be easily redirected. DirectX and its libraries are all compiled into native code and coupled tightly with the windows kernel. Any attempt to reverse engineer this will certainly not be helped along by Microsoft and given the complexity of the DirectX libraries, which include routines for sound, 2D and 3D drawing, feedback devices, and many others, the task would be extremely difficult at best. Past experiences within the computing industry have shown that such linkages, where they occur without the support of the vendors in question, are fragile and extremely prone to breakage if either system changes.
The Java and.NET idea of a common language runtime assembly however holds out hope that a solution may eventually be feasible. The idea of the common language runtime is to create a virtual assembly language which can then be easily mapped into the native assembly instructions used on the target machine. In this manner even a complex library such as DirectX could theoretically be compiled to this virtual assembly and easily distributed for use on a wide variety of platforms. Back to the gamming issue...
The majority of the game development done these days with the exception of Sony and Nintendo console platforms, which use their own proprietary libraries, uses Microsoft DirectX. This adds an additional political dimension to the problem because companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are reluctant to make their crown jewels (i.e. their gaming libraries) available for release on compatible commodity hardware.
The short and easy answer to your question is yes, there might be some way to develop a mapping layer to handle method calls and returns. However, the complexity, expense, and reliability of such an undertaking given the technical difficulties and political realties make this solution unappealing at the very least. If it could have been done easily, cheaply, and reliably then it probably already would have been done a while ago. Most people simply purchase the console(s) of their choice or maintain a windows boot partition just for gaming. Unless or until the gaming industry and the companies involved decide to develop a common language assembly and provide versions of their libraries in this assembly this problem will continue to persist. Even then there is the issue of backwards compatability with existing games.
As a disclaimer I do not program for the games industry, but some of my CS classmates ended up working in the game industry and this is my understanding from my conversations with them and my personal experiences. I may be wrong about certain minor details, but I think that I have presented the basic problems from the programmers' point of view.
On the privacy tab in the enhanced playback and device experience group box there is a series of check boxes, one of which controls the "acquire licenses automatically for protected content" function.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of the posters here were quick to point the finger at Microsoft for their perceived lack of quality. However, regardless of what you think about the relative quality of Microsoft's products one must concede that Windows gets the vast majority of the attention from virus writers, crackers, and other malcontents. It is not fair, for example, to conclude from these attacks alone that an alternative operating system, such as Linux or MacOS, would be more secure if it were placed in a similar market position (most popular OS run by 90%+ users out there). There could be many holes in the alternative operating system just waiting to be exposed when the previously mentioned malcontents turn their full efforts and attention to the new arrival in the number one slot. I am not trying to suggest that Windows is the best choice available, but I submit that one cannot draw a well founded conclusion about the relative quality or security of an operating system until it too has been in the hot seat and faced the brunt of the attackers' efforts over a period of years.
If we sold it to the Chinese they would probably turn it around to face the earth instead of the stars and use it for spying/surveillance purposes.
This brings me to my overall question: is the censorship that real, that hard to get around, and how do you do it? What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?
Bear in mind that any breach of the law in China will likely land you in a dingy prison cell for 10 years while they get around to hearing the case, followed by your 10 minute trial (guilty verdict for subversion already stamped and ready to go), and finishing with your 10 years of hard labor in one of their people's work camps. I suggested that you stay here in the United States unless you were born in China and still have family there. I don't know about you, but the only way that I would want to see China is in uniform looking through a gun sight.
I am not looking forward to using two thin putty knives to open my brand new machine though. Why couldn't they have just made it user serviceable for RAM?
The Apple Corporation and Steve Jobs in particular seem to have some sort of obsessive compulsive fetish about hermetically sealed devices that users cannot open easily for upgrades or repairs. I don't know about other people, but for me this has been a major factor in my decision NOT to purchase Apple products over the years. Now, before the Mac Zealots mod me down as flamebait, I will concede that not ALL of Apple's products are like this, but many of them are and I am simply suggesting that using screws instead of glue would be an inexpensive way for Apple to improve their reception among current PC users who may be considering a switch.
I am both an American computer science graduate and a software engineer so I will attempt to explain to you why some of us, but most assuredly not all of us, are reluctant to look at Linux in our careers.
.NET Framework Library support. However, if people in the Linux community want more people and developers to look at Linux then they should work on convincing large companies to employ more Linux developers. It is good to see IBM putting real money into expanding the market for Linux, someone needed to blaze that trail and IBM has the resources to do it.
1. People can say what they want about Microsoft, but at the end of the day, from the developer's prospective, 85-95% of the jobs currently available (and that is being generous to Linux) involve Microsoft in some capacity. Thus, for many of us who have bills to pay each month and families to feed the decision to pursue the Microsoft route after college was purely a pragmatic one.
2. Despite the bad press that Microsoft often gets in the Linux community they treat their developers very well. The Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) is actively and extensively supported by Microsoft with continually updated content including technical documentation, articles, code samples, and developer blogs from internal Microsoft product teams. The other thing that Microsoft has going for them is Visual Studio which pretty much sets the standard by which all other IDEs out there are measured. Visual Studio is the best development environment available because Microsoft spends the money necessary to make sure that it is the best development environment available.
Having said these things I would like to point out that I like Linux as well and I hope that the Mono and/or DotGNU projects succeed in their CLR and
Even while Bush gives his oath of office this Thursday for his second term the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and their Democratic allies in Washington are already lining up to gut the necessary changes to the Social Security System (the Republicans do not have enough votes in the senate to break a filibuster). The system is desperately in need of reforms to limit government borrowing from the Social Security Trust Fund and to institute private accounts. Those people who assert that the system needs no reform are being disingenuous at best. If you ask any actuary for an analysis of the social security trust fund he will tell you that we need to act soon or we may be too late to prevent the inevitable collapse should the system remain as it is today. The main problem is this: the senior citizens collectively form one of the most powerful special interest groups in the country and their interest is to maximize the amount of their monthly benefit checks, even though they will already received hundreds and perhaps thousands of times the amount that they paid into the system. Many of them are extremely militant about this after all they are "entitled" or so they have been lead to believe. It is actually not surprising that this is the case, these are not greedy people per se, but for many of them social security is all that they have left. The baby boomers especially were remarkably unsophisticated when it came to planning for their own retirements and if political history has shown anything it has show that a measure which robs from Peter to pay Paul will always have the support of Paul. Now if you are young person, and especially if you are young Democrat then listen up, the senior citizens in this country and Democrats in congress are lining up to preserve their low interest access to loans from the Social Security Trust fund AND to raise your payroll taxes over the next ten years by perhaps 50%. There is no other way that two workers can support one retiree under their plan, no benefit cuts and no age minimum increases, unless they massively hike taxes. Even if you invested all of your private account in treasury bonds you would still do better than ZERO percent interest on your money under the current system. The source of money would even be the same, the government, but the Democrats don't want that because then they would have to pay you interest to borrow your retirement money and spend it. If you are young person and you want your money to be there when it is your turn then get on board with the private accounts. The parents of the baby boomers told them the same things, or didn't tell them, about social security fifty years ago, that there was no problem and that everything would be fine, because by the time their children figured out the truth they would be too dead to care. Don't let it come to that again.
you are taking the example too literally and have obviously missed the point. The point is that people generally want to do the minimum amount of work required to achieve their desired result. This provides a powerful disincentive for people to take up challenging professions in a society where the rewards are no greater for those who succeed at the challenging profession. Ask anyone who has actually lived under a communist system and they will tell you that working without incentive and without hope for improving your life or the life your family (no matter how hard you work or how well you perform) is no way to live.
The problem with public ownership, as Mr. Gates so aptly put it, is that it removes the incentive for individuals to improve that which is pubically owned. The individual in the communist society is going to say, "Why should I go to school and learn to program when I will receive nothing more than what the garbage man gets in compensation?" At the end of the day the only things that get us out of bed in the morning to do economically productive work are incentives and the most powerful incentive of all is money. Sure, there might be the occaisonal altruistic soul who creates purely for the joy of creation itself, but unfortunately for most of us, the mortage really is due at the end of the month, our children really do need to be fed, and people really do want to make life better for their families. One cannot do any of these things effectively in a society without incentives...it just doesn't work, just ask anyone who lived in the Russia during the Soviet era.
If I invent the next Chia pet in my basement, they'll own it. And I know a lot of companies are like this, presumably because they can get away with it.
Lawyers and their corporate masters usually get carried away with the language that they use in their contracts. It is sort of like used car salesmen, they price the car way high, not because they think that they can actually sell it for that amount, but because they know that you will haggle them down to the price which is actually reasonable. The goal in contract law is to be as broad as possible without being blatantly illegal, but particularly onerous clauses, especially in non-compete agreements and other employee/employer contracts are frequently not enforceable. In other words what they can make you sign and what they can actually enforce in court are two different things. The only problem is that it may cost you a lot to find out that you are right and they know that.
Nakamura should have really gone and formed his own company if he truly developed this idea on his own.
That can be risky because your original employer can come back after you are successful and sue for damages, royalties, etc...unless you can prove that you had idea AFTER you were no longer employed by them (especially difficult if the patent is in the same field as the company's business). Otherwise, the assumption is that you quit so that you could develop it on your own without giving them their cut.
In the words of Dilbert, "How about I trade you my joy of technical achievement for your raise and bonus?"
The joy of achievement alone may be enough wherever this guy lives (la la land maybe?), but here in the real world we take cash on the barrel head...accept no substitutes.
Nice cut for a sweet invention
Not really, 8 million is a pittance compared to the revenues that Nichia Corporation realizes ( approximately 1.4 billion dollars) every year because of Mr. Nakamura's invention. They should have offered him at least $100 million in stock and/or bonuses.
they are going to begin denying updates to those people not running at least Windows XP SP1 because of all the pirated installations of pre-sp1 Windows XP Pro out there (corporate keys fiasco).
Many apartment dwellers have problems getting their own roommates to pay their share of the base rent and now you want to throw in a shared T1 expense? That is just asking for trouble when the rent (on the T1 line) comes due.
Does this include their patent for their Jet Powered Surfboard? If I remember correctly they bought this one just so they could display it in their collection of obscure and unusual patents.
This is absolutely correct. The thing that I do not understand is this. The electronics, computer hardware, and software industry (collectively the technology industry), when considered globally, is a trillion dollar industry. The consumers don't want DRM, they have made that preference loud and clear in the marketplace thus far. The entertainment and content industry is maybe 100 billion dollars per year world wide (and that is being generous). So why don't the technology companies band together, give the consumers what they want, increase their revenues and tell Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA, etc to piss up the proverbial f***ing rope?
There are far too many MMORPGs these days because every small startup game company and their publishers and investors were rushing to jump on the bandwagon. The trouble with these types of games is that they put such demands upon a player's time that he or she rarely has time for more than one MMORPG addiction. That combined with the fact that MMORPGs are not yet and probably never will be (due to the aforementioned time constraints) part of the mainstream. The end result of all of this is too many MMORPGs chasing too few players and therefore too few dollars. What do investors do when a company is hemorrhaging money like an arterial bleeder? They pull the plug and it appears that that is exactly what happened here.
Some of the things that these people do in those computer labs are absolutely hysterical. Do they even know that they are being watched? To bad that most of the girls that one finds in the computer labs are of the decidedly more nerdy variety.
How come Cocaine comes from the Catholic countries anyway? You won't see Iran manufacturing it anytime soon.
That's because cocaine doesn't grow very well in the Middle East. They grow opium poppies instead and supply the raw materials for the heroin trade in Europe and the United States. If the Iranian people truley wish to condemn terrorism then they need to start putting their money where their mouth is and not into the pockets of the terrorists. Iran is a state sponsor of terrorist organizations and if they continue funding radical madrassas, granting safe haven to terrorists, and sponsoring terrorist groups, then it is only a matter of time before they force another major confrontation with the west. They have sowed the wind with their support of terrorism and if they continue with their present policies then they will reap the whirlwind of our swift and sure response.
THe problem is a political one and we need a political answer. The people of Iran need to make it heard that they want blogs and such. Only they can secure their own freedoms. The best thing that we as a free people can do is offer assistance in helping their government learn that free speach is good.
You forget that Iran is a theocracy run by religious fanatics. The ruling council of ayatollahs is the real power in Iran. The parliament is simply there to rubber stamp their edicts and handle the trivial matters. The Iranian people either agree with everything that the ayatollahs do and say (the minority) or they are too afraid to speak out for fear of their lives. Would you speak out against the government when the punishment was indefinite imprisonment, the amputation of limbs, or death? The only way to liberate people caught in the grip of repressive tyranny is by force, it is the only language that ayatollahs, communist party chairmen, and dictators understand and respect. If you believe that the ayatollahs give a damn about what the people want or free speech then you are living in fantasy land. The real world, especially outside of the United States, is far uglier and nastier than most Americans either know or are willing to believe.
Heh...hell, its going to happen eventually anyway...why not do it now when we have the army over there to do it with?
Are there not companies which specialize in manufacturing the chip designs of other client companies? Why couldn't Transmeta design their chips, license their intellectual property, and then have their chips manufactured by one of these fabrication companies. I am no expert on the microprocessor industry, but I have heard it said that a large percentage of operating costs go towards running those expensive fabrication plants.
Perhaps if this project lasts long enough they will turn it over to the open source community when their funding runs out? Then we could have polls on slashdot to decide which features get added to the rovers software or which rock it visits next.
I'm a system admin, not a programmer
.NET idea of a common language runtime assembly however holds out hope that a solution may eventually be feasible. The idea of the common language runtime is to create a virtual assembly language which can then be easily mapped into the native assembly instructions used on the target machine. In this manner even a complex library such as DirectX could theoretically be compiled to this virtual assembly and easily distributed for use on a wide variety of platforms. Back to the gamming issue...
Well then you are in luck because I am a programmer and will endeavor to answer your question.
The problem with translation of calls is that there is no binary compatibility between DirectX library calls which use the dynamic link library (dll) and the Linux kernel by which the calls and their returns could be easily redirected. DirectX and its libraries are all compiled into native code and coupled tightly with the windows kernel. Any attempt to reverse engineer this will certainly not be helped along by Microsoft and given the complexity of the DirectX libraries, which include routines for sound, 2D and 3D drawing, feedback devices, and many others, the task would be extremely difficult at best. Past experiences within the computing industry have shown that such linkages, where they occur without the support of the vendors in question, are fragile and extremely prone to breakage if either system changes.
The Java and
The majority of the game development done these days with the exception of Sony and Nintendo console platforms, which use their own proprietary libraries, uses Microsoft DirectX. This adds an additional political dimension to the problem because companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are reluctant to make their crown jewels (i.e. their gaming libraries) available for release on compatible commodity hardware.
The short and easy answer to your question is yes, there might be some way to develop a mapping layer to handle method calls and returns. However, the complexity, expense, and reliability of such an undertaking given the technical difficulties and political realties make this solution unappealing at the very least. If it could have been done easily, cheaply, and reliably then it probably already would have been done a while ago. Most people simply purchase the console(s) of their choice or maintain a windows boot partition just for gaming. Unless or until the gaming industry and the companies involved decide to develop a common language assembly and provide versions of their libraries in this assembly this problem will continue to persist. Even then there is the issue of backwards compatability with existing games.
As a disclaimer I do not program for the games industry, but some of my CS classmates ended up working in the game industry and this is my understanding from my conversations with them and my personal experiences. I may be wrong about certain minor details, but I think that I have presented the basic problems from the programmers' point of view.
Tools->Options
On the privacy tab in the enhanced playback and device experience group box there is a series of check boxes, one of which controls the "acquire licenses automatically for protected content" function.
Is this what you meant?