When computers were more expensive, only the more well-off (and usually more educated) could afford them, which is why adventures, especially the cerebral Infocom kind, were more popular
No. I disagree. Most of the rich people that I know are dumb as rocks, so I discount the connection between cerebral and affluent. I think that Al Lowe (creator of Leisure Suit Larry games) said it best:
You know, there's another thing about games of the 80s... I think adventure games were the right kind of game for the kind of person who was playing, particularly the PC people. I really believe that if you could run DOS and figure out all the stupid, crazy stuff like extended memory and how to put drivers in high memory and memory management that you had to do if you were going to be successful with a PC back in the 80s, then you just had to be a puzzle solver.
And remember command lines, where you type in commands? Adventure games really played right into the strong suit of those engineer types who were
good at that. I remember vividly back in the late 80s, Ken [Williams] and I had a conversation; "Won't it be great when everybody has a computer and can play our games?" We figured that when computers were in 50% of homes, that was probably as far as it was gonna go. The other half probably didn't need one or care. Although now it looks like we were underestimating. But what we didn't take into consideration was that when 50% of people have computers, they're gonna want to watch FOX! They're not gonna be interested in PBS and thinking games, you know?
From WHERE exactly can I buy those machines please ?
Check out the Dell Poweredge 300SC. I just bought one (they were $100 cheaper last month) and I am really happy with it. All told, including tax, shipping, and one gig of RAM from Crucial, I spent $1120 for a P3/800, 40G IDE disk, and that sleek black case that I can I completely take apart without a screwdriver.
What about the ability to burn DVDs? Apple already has a cheap DVD burner, it can't be too long before the technology (which was developed by another company, I forget which) appears in other devices, or on the parts market. A DVD-based box with the functionality of a VCR would sell like hotcakes.
iMovie-style camcorder interface and DVD authoring.
Apple's recent happy-happy web pages on their new DVD-writing drive, announced this month (http://www.apple.com/idvd/). It's full of glowing info about how you can write DVDs based on your own DV movie recordings, etc. What it quietly neglects to say is that you can't use it to copy or time-shift or record any audio or video copyrighted by major companies. Even if you have the legal right to do so, the technology will prevent you. They don't say that you can't use it to mix and match video tracks from various artists, the way your CD burner will. It doesn't say that you can't copy-protect your own disks that it burns; that's a right the big manufacturers have reserved to themselves. They're not selling you a DVD-Authoring drive, which is for "professional use only". They're selling you a DVD-General drive, which cannot record the key-blocks needed to copy-protect your own recordings, nor can a DVD-General disc be used as a master to press your own DVDs in quantity. These distinctions are not even glossed over; they are simply ignored, not mentioned, invisible until after you buy the product.
Can you point to one that works? The ATI card that you mention can only record AVI files without dropping frames. Same with the Hauppauge cards. And if you make the resolution anything better than "crap" then you bump up against the 2G file size limit on AVI files. ("A 32-bit pointer ought to be enough for anyone..." Thank you, Microsoft).
To have useful TV recording software, you need something that will record a bunch of 1.99G files for you and stitch them together during playback, or you need an MPEG encorder card, which costs $500.
Amazon patenting One-Click shopping and therefore triggering a boycott by the geek contingent.
Amazon.com loses money on every item they sell, so the "geek boycott" actually is SAVING them money, pushing the company towards profitability.
Do you want to hurt Amazon.com? I mean really hurt them? Then you should buy everything you that you possible can from them. Amazon lost a BILLION dollars last year. With the combined purchasing power of all the geeks on Slashdot, we could make this two billion dollars and really drive them into the ground! --
Advertising in games will provide another revenue stream for game creators. This effect will be very bad. Now instead of working on making the game better, game publishers will be concerned about hyping the game so they can get more ad revenue. "The most awaited game of the year!" "Give your ad budget to us!" Small publishers (read: creative publishers) won't get any of this money.
Just think about all the ad revenue that daikatana could have pulled in. The hype was amazing... the newspaper articles, the fawning websites, the mention in Playboy... advertisers would have been falling all over themselves trying to get their product placement into daikatana... "I don't care if it sucks, I read about it in the New York Times!"
It is a good thing that Ion Storm lost a bundle on daikatana. They should have. The game sucked. Romero is an idiot. Losing millions on the game taught them this lesson, that they won't soon forget.
Advertising revenue would have reduced the power of the lesson. That would have been a BAD THING. --
Besides, the mandelbrot set relies on a pretty recent advancement in mathematics: the use of complex numbers as (x,y)-coordinates on a plane.
Complex numbers have been studied for centries, but it was not until 1797 that the Norwegian Casper Wessel, in a paper read before the Royal Academy of Denmark, brought out the fact that since i^2 = -1, and since -1 could be looked upon as a unit vector which has been rotated through 180 degrees, then i could be looked upon as a unit vector which has been rotated halfway, or 90 degrees, or from the x-axis to the y-axis.
Reference: "Laplace Transforms for Electronic Engineers" by James Holbrook.
So our 13th century monk would have had to invent the concept of geometry on the complex plane, as well. Smart monk!
I am concerned about the on-going attack against the public's rights under copyright law.
1. The Legislature recently passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, extended copyrights to far beyond the "limited times" mentioned in the Constitution. This act does not "promote... useful arts"; it promotes individual gains. Disney has borrowed greatly from the Public Domain and returned nothing. Bach's heirs didn't expect to be rich from their father's work; they wrote their own. Art and science used to belong to the people (after 28 years). Now it belongs only to the richest corporations. No works produced after 1910 have entered the public domain because the term keeps getting extended. A society with
no Public Domain art is bankrupt.
2. The Courts have recently upheld the portions of the DMCA that prohibit "circumvention devices". In effect, these provisions remove our "fair use" rights under copyright law to produce critical reviews, parodies, and scholarly derivative works. There is also no provision for the release of protected works when the copyright expires.
3. The FCC (part of the Executive Branch) has approved the use of "content protection" as part of the broadcast HDTV specification. This ruling destroys the public right to record broadcasts and view them at our leisure (a right upheld by the Supreme Court in the Betamax case).
Is seems that all three branches of our government have turned against us. What can we do take back our rights under copyright law, without breaking the law?
I got a spam on this console a few weeks ago, so naturally I assume it's some kind of crap ripoff.
Ripoff or not, *now* I don't care. I don't care if it's the greatest DVD/VCD/MP3/BFD player out there. I don't care if it's region-free, macrovision-deleting, or bread-buttering. I don't care if it's the best deal on earth and it cures cancer.
HarperCollins? Couldn't he have picked a better publisher? As far as I'm concerned, HarperCollins has the worst reputation for publishing tabloid quality books of any publisher that I know.
If I recall correctly, HarperCollins published Canter and Siegel's book, "How to make a fortune on the information superhighway". Canter and Siegel were the green card attorneys that "invented" spamming to newsgroups. They ruined usenet for everyone. And HarperCollins published their book, explaining how to do it.
I still have my original Joel Furr "Green Card" T-Shirt. --
Sorry, I lost all respect for Danny Elfman when we scored the Batman films. Instead of using Neal Hefti's Batman TV Theme, he replaced it with a song by The-Artist-Then-Known-As-Prince. He must have been on crack.
Here's a quote from a Hefti Bio:
But his theme was not used for the recent popular ``Batman'' movies, because the composer hired to the score the movies, Danny Elfman, ``hates it'' and couldn't do anything with it. Cleary, Mr. Elfman doesn't know anything about jazz, otherwise he would have realized that Hefti's catchy riff is probably the most flexible theme song ever written. Any of a million tunes could have layered over Hefti's basic twelve bar form, and made any sort of new composition out of it. Mr. Elfman should brush up on his jazz improvisation and reaquaint himself with the infinite flexibility inherent in twelve bar blues.
...is certainly going to be a helluva lot more than one third your salary.
Yes, but at least that money would be going to some nano-technology buckyball-growing cool-ass research group, instead of going to bankroll more civil wars in Africa. How many people died for that jewel on your honey's finger?
How else can two months' salary last forever? By keeping corrupt diamond-friendly regimes in power.
-- DeBeers, Corrupting Africa since 1870.
Off Topic: when the hell did it become "one third your salary"? I remember when it was one month! Now we're supposed to spend four months working to artificially inflate the value of a rather common mineral for the benefit of the DeBeers cartel and to the detriment of the third world. No thanks. --
I'll probably do up Scheme and Lisp versions over the long weekend; it would probably be an interesting exercise to do it in OCAML, as an exercise in pattern matching. Betcha most of them fit into under a page, and well within the constraints of a/. message...
Sounds like we need a contest for the shortest decodecat program. Use any lanuage you want, must read stdin and output barcode on stdout, 'wc' is the final arbiteur.
I stopped by RatShack on my way to work to pick up a CueCat, and the sales guy *talked me out of* taking a RatShack catalog. --
From his page: I'm beginning to think we're headed into a new age where private property is abolished -- but instead of everything being owned by the state, it will be owned by corporations.
I'm sending $100 to the EFF today. This kind of crap has got to stop.
I hope everyone who reads this article (and who can afford it) will join me. --
Okay, I'll avoid making the obvious stupid joke here about "I'm going to patent blah blah blah".
Seriously, what would our economy be like if businesses had taken out patents on trade over the telephone at the begining of the century the way that they're taking out patents on trade over the internet now. It would be ridiculous. Imagine:
Sears and Roebuck announce One Name Shopping(tm)! Using our patented technology, we will keep your name and address on file in our offices, so when you call, all you have to give us is your name. We will fill out the rest of your mailing label (for the bill and the shipped merchandise) automatically. Available ONLY at Sears and Roebuck. Call us at Pennsylvania 5-6000.
Bleh. As much as I hate lawsuits and loathe lawyers, perhaps we need a Class Action Suit against the Patent Office for restricting free trade with this sort of nonsense. It's got to stop. --
Outdated/limited information... a textbook published in 1970 may be teaching not only misleading but WRONG information, and thus limiting the date on these things may be useful
Absolutely not. This cannot happen. I collect Electrical Engineering textbooks from the 1940's and 1950's (particularly on control and radar, like the MIT Radiation Lab Series). Some of the information in these books is wrong, or at least immature or underdeveloped. Want to really understand control? Read Nyquist's or Bode's or Evan's textbooks!
So what? It would be an immeasurable loss to amatuer historians like me if old textbooks "expired." Time limitations must be stopped. --
Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located.
Without charge? Hey Judge Kaplan, I PAID GOOD MONEY FOR THIS DVD. I just want to watch it.
Have you completed a book in the last eight or so years? If so, it is probably for sale at http://www.amazon.com, a for-profit company which I understand is publically traded. Mine is there and I never gave them permission to sell it. As far as I know, I am the sole owner of the copyright on my book. Even my ex-wife had to ask permission (she did) before she could make it available on a web site (for free, by the way).
But 18th-century notions of copyright doesn't make sense in the year 2000...
I would argue the opposite. The 18th-century notion of copyright DOES make sense today: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
Get it? In my opinion, the 18th-century notion has two key words here: "promote" and "limited". Copyrights used to be 14 years, renewable for another 14 years.
It's the corrupted 20th-century notion that is fscked. The Sonny Bono "Screw The Public" Act had two clauses: (1) The Mickey Mouse clause, preventing anything Disney has even done from entering the public domain (95 years for works-for-hire), and (2) The Gershwin Heirs clause, keeping the Gershwins rich (life+70 years for works of individuals).
How does this promote useful arts? It doesn't. It promotes individual gains. Disney has borrowed greatly from the Public Domain and returned nothing. Bach's heirs didn't expect to be rich from their father's work; they wrote their own. The Congress has been bought and paid for. Art and science used to belong to the people (after 28 years). Now it belongs only to the richest campaign donor.
We have a moral obligation to fight the current copyright system. We must take back the public domain. A society with no public domain art is bankrupt. --
Slashdot Mirror
No. I disagree. Most of the rich people that I know are dumb as rocks, so I discount the connection between cerebral and affluent. I think that Al Lowe (creator of Leisure Suit Larry games) said it best:
This quote was taken from his interview at at Applelinks
http://games.applelinks.com/moofie2001/al3.shtml. It's another good read with a giant from the golden age of adventure games.
--
From WHERE exactly can I buy those machines please ?
Check out the Dell Poweredge 300SC. I just bought one (they were $100 cheaper last month) and I am really happy with it. All told, including tax, shipping, and one gig of RAM from Crucial, I spent $1120 for a P3/800, 40G IDE disk, and that sleek black case that I can I completely take apart without a screwdriver.
And there's no Microsoft tax.
--
Please note that Apple's DVD burner, and the concept of "DVD authoring" are mutually exclusive. From John Gilmore's What Wrong with Copy Protection:
--
Can you point to one that works? The ATI card that you mention can only record AVI files without dropping frames. Same with the Hauppauge cards. And if you make the resolution anything better than "crap" then you bump up against the 2G file size limit on AVI files. ("A 32-bit pointer ought to be enough for anyone..." Thank you, Microsoft).
To have useful TV recording software, you need something that will record a bunch of 1.99G files for you and stitch them together during playback, or you need an MPEG encorder card, which costs $500.
You can't build a cheap TiVo yet.
--
The difference between corporate and governmental data collecting can be summed up as:
1) Lie to a corporation, and you don't get a free keychain.
2) Lie to the government, and you go to jail.
Is that clear enough?
--
Amazon patenting One-Click shopping and therefore triggering a boycott by the geek contingent.
Amazon.com loses money on every item they sell, so the "geek boycott" actually is SAVING them money, pushing the company towards profitability.
Do you want to hurt Amazon.com? I mean really hurt them? Then you should buy everything you that you possible can from them. Amazon lost a BILLION dollars last year. With the combined purchasing power of all the geeks on Slashdot, we could make this two billion dollars and really drive them into the ground!
--
Advertising in games will provide another revenue stream for game creators. This effect will be very bad. Now instead of working on making the game better, game publishers will be concerned about hyping the game so they can get more ad revenue. "The most awaited game of the year!" "Give your ad budget to us!" Small publishers (read: creative publishers) won't get any of this money.
Just think about all the ad revenue that daikatana could have pulled in. The hype was amazing... the newspaper articles, the fawning websites, the mention in Playboy... advertisers would have been falling all over themselves trying to get their product placement into daikatana... "I don't care if it sucks, I read about it in the New York Times!"
It is a good thing that Ion Storm lost a bundle on daikatana. They should have. The game sucked. Romero is an idiot. Losing millions on the game taught them this lesson, that they won't soon forget.
Advertising revenue would have reduced the power of the lesson. That would have been a BAD THING.
--
Besides, the mandelbrot set relies on a pretty recent advancement in mathematics: the use of complex numbers as (x,y)-coordinates on a plane.
Complex numbers have been studied for centries, but it was not until 1797 that the Norwegian Casper Wessel, in a paper read before the Royal Academy of Denmark, brought out the fact that since i^2 = -1, and since -1 could be looked upon as a unit vector which has been rotated through 180 degrees, then i could be looked upon as a unit vector which has been rotated halfway, or 90 degrees, or from the x-axis to the y-axis.
Reference: "Laplace Transforms for Electronic Engineers" by James Holbrook.
So our 13th century monk would have had to invent the concept of geometry on the complex plane, as well. Smart monk!
--
I am concerned about the on-going attack against the public's rights under copyright law.
1. The Legislature recently passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, extended copyrights to far beyond the "limited times" mentioned in the Constitution. This act does not "promote... useful arts"; it promotes individual gains. Disney has borrowed greatly from the Public Domain and returned nothing. Bach's heirs didn't expect to be rich from their father's work; they wrote their own. Art and science used to belong to the people (after 28 years). Now it belongs only to the richest corporations. No works produced after 1910 have entered the public domain because the term keeps getting extended. A society with
no Public Domain art is bankrupt.
2. The Courts have recently upheld the portions of the DMCA that prohibit "circumvention devices". In effect, these provisions remove our "fair use" rights under copyright law to produce critical reviews, parodies, and scholarly derivative works. There is also no provision for the release of protected works when the copyright expires.
3. The FCC (part of the Executive Branch) has approved the use of "content protection" as part of the broadcast HDTV specification. This ruling destroys the public right to record broadcasts and view them at our leisure (a right upheld by the Supreme Court in the Betamax case).
Is seems that all three branches of our government have turned against us. What can we do take back our rights under copyright law, without breaking the law?
--
If this scares you, then send $100 to the EFF.
My check will be in the mail this evening.
--
> "There really isn't much value in free," said Miller.
What he really means is:
"There really isn't much value in freedom." At least, not from the Microsoft viewpoint.
--
I got a spam on this console a few weeks ago, so naturally I assume it's some kind of crap ripoff.
Ripoff or not, *now* I don't care. I don't care if it's the greatest DVD/VCD/MP3/BFD player out there. I don't care if it's region-free, macrovision-deleting, or bread-buttering. I don't care if it's the best deal on earth and it cures cancer.
If it's advertised by spam, I ain't buying one.
--
HarperCollins? Couldn't he have picked a better publisher? As far as I'm concerned, HarperCollins has the worst reputation for publishing tabloid quality books of any publisher that I know.
If I recall correctly, HarperCollins published Canter and Siegel's book, "How to make a fortune on the information superhighway". Canter and Siegel were the green card attorneys that "invented" spamming to newsgroups. They ruined usenet for everyone. And HarperCollins published their book, explaining how to do it.
I still have my original Joel Furr "Green Card" T-Shirt.
--
Okay, so consider the following (fictitious) election results from 100
voters, where people ranked their choices from best to worst.
40 voters
---------
1. Bush
2. Nader
3. Death
4. Gore
35 voters
---------
1. Gore
2. Nader
3. Death
4. Bush
25 voters
---------
1. Nader
2. Gore
3. Bush
(where "Death" means "I'd rather die than vote for...")
Who should win this election?
In head-to-head two-man elections:
A) Nader beats Bush (60 versus 40)
B) Nader beats Gore (65 versus 35)
C) Gore beats Bush (60 versus 40)
In a plurality, Bush would win because he got the most votes.
In a run-off election, Gore would face Bush (and win) even though Nader
would have beaten either one of them in the run-off.
In an approval vote, (where people cast a vote for everyone that they
rank above Death) Nader would get 100 votes, Bush 65, and Gore 60.
In a ranking vote (5 points for first choice, 4 for second, etc)
Nader would get 425 points, Gore 355, and Bush 345.
Now which is the best system?
--
No way, Danny Elfman all the way!
Sorry, I lost all respect for Danny Elfman when we scored the Batman films. Instead of using Neal Hefti's Batman TV Theme, he replaced it with a song by The-Artist-Then-Known-As-Prince. He must have been on crack.
Here's a quote from a Hefti Bio:
But his theme was not used for the recent popular ``Batman'' movies, because the composer hired to the score the movies, Danny Elfman, ``hates it'' and couldn't do anything with it. Cleary, Mr. Elfman doesn't know anything about jazz, otherwise he would have realized that Hefti's catchy riff is probably the most flexible theme song ever written. Any of a million tunes could have layered over Hefti's basic twelve bar form, and made any sort of new composition out of it. Mr. Elfman should brush up on his jazz improvisation and reaquaint himself with the infinite flexibility inherent in twelve bar blues.
--
Oh boy! Virtual Memory! I'm going to make a HUGE ramdisk!
--
...is certainly going to be a helluva lot more than one third your salary.
t m
Yes, but at least that money would be going to some nano-technology buckyball-growing cool-ass research group, instead of going to bankroll more civil wars in Africa. How many people died for that jewel on your honey's finger?
How else can two months' salary last forever? By keeping corrupt diamond-friendly regimes in power.
-- DeBeers, Corrupting Africa since 1870.
see http://people.ne.mediaone.net/ben_inker/DeBeers.h
Off Topic: when the hell did it become "one third your salary"? I remember when it was one month! Now we're supposed to spend four months working to artificially inflate the value of a rather common mineral for the benefit of the DeBeers cartel and to the detriment of the third world. No thanks.
--
I'll probably do up Scheme and Lisp versions over the long weekend; it would probably be an interesting exercise to do it in OCAML, as an exercise in pattern matching. Betcha most of them fit into under a page, and well within the constraints of a /. message...
Sounds like we need a contest for the shortest decodecat program. Use any lanuage you want, must read stdin and output barcode on stdout, 'wc' is the final arbiteur.
I stopped by RatShack on my way to work to pick up a CueCat, and the sales guy *talked me out of* taking a RatShack catalog.
--
From his page: I'm beginning to think we're headed into a new age where private property is abolished -- but instead of everything being owned by the state, it will be owned by corporations.
I'm sending $100 to the EFF today. This kind of crap has got to stop.
I hope everyone who reads this article (and who can afford it) will join me.
--
Okay, I'll avoid making the obvious stupid joke here about "I'm going to patent blah blah blah".
Seriously, what would our economy be like if businesses had taken out patents on trade over the telephone at the begining of the century the way that they're taking out patents on trade over the internet now. It would be ridiculous. Imagine:
Sears and Roebuck announce One Name Shopping(tm)! Using our patented technology, we will keep your name and address on file in our offices, so when you call, all you have to give us is your name. We will fill out the rest of your mailing label (for the bill and the shipped merchandise) automatically. Available ONLY at Sears and Roebuck. Call us at Pennsylvania 5-6000.
Bleh. As much as I hate lawsuits and loathe lawyers, perhaps we need a Class Action Suit against the Patent Office for restricting free trade with this sort of nonsense. It's got to stop.
--
Outdated/limited information... a textbook published in 1970 may be teaching not only misleading but WRONG information, and thus limiting the date on these things may be useful
Absolutely not. This cannot happen. I collect Electrical Engineering textbooks from the 1940's and 1950's (particularly on control and radar, like the MIT Radiation Lab Series). Some of the information in these books is wrong, or at least immature or underdeveloped. Want to really understand control? Read Nyquist's or Bode's or Evan's textbooks!
So what? It would be an immeasurable loss to amatuer historians like me if old textbooks "expired." Time limitations must be stopped.
--
Well, duh! Nothing makes me sit still and concentrate like trying to complete Act 3 and 4. I'm so focused I forget to eat and sleep.
Man, I hate those fscking flayer midgets.
--
Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located.
Without charge? Hey Judge Kaplan, I PAID GOOD MONEY FOR THIS DVD. I just want to watch it.
Is that concept really so hard to understand?
--
Have you completed a book in the last eight or so years? If so, it is probably for sale at http://www.amazon.com, a for-profit company which I understand is publically traded. Mine is there and I never gave them permission to sell it. As far as I know, I am the sole owner of the copyright on my book. Even my ex-wife had to ask permission (she did) before she could make it available on a web site (for free, by the way).
--
But 18th-century notions of copyright doesn't make sense in the year 2000...
I would argue the opposite. The 18th-century notion of copyright DOES make sense today: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
Get it? In my opinion, the 18th-century notion has two key words here: "promote" and "limited". Copyrights used to be 14 years, renewable for another 14 years.
It's the corrupted 20th-century notion that is fscked. The Sonny Bono "Screw The Public" Act had two clauses: (1) The Mickey Mouse clause, preventing anything Disney has even done from entering the public domain (95 years for works-for-hire), and (2) The Gershwin Heirs clause, keeping the Gershwins rich (life+70 years for works of individuals).
How does this promote useful arts? It doesn't. It promotes individual gains. Disney has borrowed greatly from the Public Domain and returned nothing. Bach's heirs didn't expect to be rich from their father's work; they wrote their own. The Congress has been bought and paid for. Art and science used to belong to the people (after 28 years). Now it belongs only to the richest campaign donor.
We have a moral obligation to fight the current copyright system. We must take back the public domain. A society with no public domain art is bankrupt.
--