much like the kids who helped build the early Net.
Nice try Jon, but the people who helped build the early Net were almost 100% stuffy middle aged gents who were working for defense contractors. They weren't doing it because "information wants to be free" or for any other similiar cause. So once again you've made a poor analogy to try and make your point..Which makes sense because usually you have no point.
The problem is that a couple months after they made these changes, EVERYONE would be doing this. Its already easy to queue files for later download for those with some amount of computer savvy. If your pricing plan came to pass, you can bet some really easy-to-use universal download queue would appear, probably saddled with spyware and advertisements, but it would get used anyway...And then they'd be even more overloaded at night than they are at any time now.
It makes it difficult (well impossible) for you to just go and burn a copy of an original XBOX game that, say, you rented from Blockbuster using a standard DVDr with standard PC DVDr software.
Yes, pirates can rip the disc so that it can be burned in the normal fashion (and they are doing this now), but this requires special software and knowledge that Joe Average doesn't have...
So basically you have a situation like the Dreamcast where things are basically in a custom format (even though its just a slight modification of the DVD format), as opposed to PS2 where games are in the standard DVD format. With a PS2 mod chip installed, I can backup DVDs on my own (again, rented from Blockbuster or borrowed from a friend or whatever) using standard DVDr and DVDr software...With an XBOX mod chip installed, I need to download the rips from online, I can't just make the copies myself unless I bother to learn the details of how things are stored and then go and write some very low level DVD data extraction software, at a minimum.
In fact, in the thread about this on the LKML someone brought up that the FSF even encourages doing this.
Whoever brought that up is full of shit. RMS is against software patents, period, end of story.
Yeah RMS isn't the entire FSF, but he basically sets the policy. And you won't find any official documentation or website backing up that claim that the FSF encourages patents on Free software.
Please refrain from passing along bogus info like that in the future unless you can back it up....
If this were Microsoft, Sun, or anyone else, you'd all be flaming them like crazy! Since its a LINUX company, most of the posts are of the variety "Well I'm sure Red Hat won't do anything bad with this..." and "Well, I'm sure its just for protection...".
Hah!
These patents are wrong. Even if Red Hat doesn't ever sue anyone, they just add to the fear and confusion software developers will face when they go to implement similar concepts -- even in Open Source projects! And whose to say the Red Hat of 5 years from now, under new management, won't go and start suing projects that use these techniques now retroactively? This isn't a trademark..So they COULD do that..
Is Red Hat going to sign contracts with any software developers who wish to implement these techniques saying they WONT sue them in the future? If they don't, you HAVE to assume they WILL sue you sometime in the future, even if the current management has all the best intentions!
Trivial software patents are DEAD WRONG. These are trivial software patents. Red Hat is WRONG. They won't see money from me in the future, EVER unless they somehow alter this situation.
And the patent-for-protection argument doesn't hold water..All they'd have to do is publish these techiques in some public place (I'm sure one of the Linux journals would give them space for this) to ensure prior art is on record.
My guess is they want to get involved in the cross-patent licensing game... Which is simply evil in general and hurts OSS developers more than anyone.
Well, based on past experience, Netscape is going to be performing illegal operations and crashing with or without the help of Microsoft's fancy new wizard.
And yes, I did 'get your point', but you can't exactly mention the name 'netscape' in any serious discussion over how badly programmed/bloated Microsoft's software is and get away with it...
Wait a second...I can the artists having an issue with this, but isn't the RIAA the entity that PAYS the payola? Couldn't they solve this in a more practical way by just coming to a consensus to stop paying indie promoters? I guess they don't trust each other unless there are laws in place to stop them from sneaking behind each other's backs? Can't say I blame them for that...
Being popular doesn't mean it does suck, either, though people who seem to pride themselves on their cool-outsider status often loudly proclaim otherwise.
Thus explaining why anyone would ever run Linux for anything...
This is all well and good, but I would have thought this is only a tiny step for most games. Many games make extensive use of platform-specific libraries to provide graphics, sound and IO support. I would imagine that running (for example) the DirectX libraries through Transitive Dynamite would be a technically interesting but legally difficult exercise. Are Microsoft really going to allow Transgaming to port their libraries to PS2?
Well that's where projects like WineX come in..Cleanroom implementations of the lower level libraries that will be used on whatever platform. Though as I mentioned in another post, there's no fucking way in hell anyone is ever going to use this technology to port a real-world modern game to the PS2...the technical issues are too numerous for me to repeat here again.
Having programmed both PC and PS2 games, the differences are VAST. First, knock Baldur's Gate off the list, its not a port of the PC game at all, its a completely unique game that just uses the Baldur's Gate brand.
For the others (Quake & Lithtech engine games), the underlying engines were ported, with quite a lot of platform specific tweaking, to the PS2, with quite a lot of functionality cut out to deal with the fact that the PS2 has almost no memory to speak of (compared to even the lowest end bargain basement PC) and the fact that as the above posted mentioned, the architectures are very different. So, while you might have Lithtech PC and Lithtech PS2, and the API for LITHTECH is pretty much the same across both, that is not the case with a lower-level API like DirectX/Direct3D whose very software architecture makes extreme assumptions about the hardware architecture it is running on.
NOBODY is going to use this to 'port' commercial games run under the PS2, period...Not gonna happen, ever. If anyone does I WILL EAT MY COMPUTER and webcam it live for all to see.
His point isn't that you can't emulate the PC under a PS2, its that it will be SO AMAZING SLOW when running in practice that there's virtually no point. Even when you ignore hardware emulation and talk about writing a D3D wrapper/facade for the PS2 and recompile using PS2 tools...The game is still going to run way too slow without major platform tweaking because the architecture of the PS2 is so radically different than you standard PC that if you try to do things in the same way, its just going to die...Not to mention things like the fact that the PS2 only has a handful of system memory and barely no video memory at all.. How many PC games, even if the PS2 and PC were completely source code compatible, would deal with that situation? Almost none that have been made in the past 5 years.
The original poster's point stands..This might be nice for Linux and Mac users but its next to useless for the PS2, dunno why they even bother mentioning it.
How are you going to do things like collision detection distributed? Do you expect me to believe that's the sort of thing you can batch out to a distributed process and get the results back from in time for it to make a difference to the overall gamestate when the checks are needed?
Security aside (enough people posted on that), MMORPGs don't do much server side processing at all. All of the heavy lifting is the graphics display on the clients and the network bandwidth required. The CPU required on the backend is rather minimal, even for 1000s of players.
There are legal software solutions for doing PS2 development, like gcc for PS2, but you can't actually get your code to run on the PS2 without installing a special chip which deactivates the PS2's copy protection system, which itself is almost surely a DMCA violation even if you don't intend to violate copyrights.
Granted, you CAN achive the same thing on some older PS2 models by using a 'knife method' to trick the DVD tray into opening, but this will probably damage your PS2 even if done over a short term, and doesn't work correctly with newer model PS2s.
Doing raw PS2 development, though, requires a hardware hack to your PS2 to disable the copy protection mechanism (which makes it very likely illegal, as per the DMCA).
Not that I particularly care if anyone breaks the law in this case, but just be aware of that.
As much as we'd all like to see pop-whatever ads go away, please never say that you support something like this. Even if the short term result would be nice, it gets us on an insanely slippery slope that we might not be able to get off of later.
If you really hate stupid patents, fight against ALL of them, even the ones that might have short-term benefits! We can't afford to pick and choose the 'good stupid patents' from the 'bad stupid patents'.
That is adding zero value.
Yes, because it's one line of code, and the code is described through the variable. But when sifting through lines of code, you often find beautiful works like iHateMyJob++; or fuckMyBoss--; to name a few. And needless to say, they're uncommented in the code. Until computer code can be written bug free in complete English sentences (aka Never), the rest of your team of workers needs to understand what your code does.
If your problem is that your programmers are naming variables thusly, the issue is that the programmers are retards to begin with. Do you really think that someone who would so poorly name variables is going to bother writing useful comments? I'd fire a programmer who named variables iHateMyBoss but commented them well long before a programmer who used comments very conservatively but chose well named method & variable names.
Slashdot Mirror
This means you Randall "merlyn" Schwartz.
BTW, Linux sucks.
Nice try Jon, but the people who helped build the early Net were almost 100% stuffy middle aged gents who were working for defense contractors. They weren't doing it because "information wants to be free" or for any other similiar cause. So once again you've made a poor analogy to try and make your point..Which makes sense because usually you have no point.
The problem is that a couple months after they made these changes, EVERYONE would be doing this. Its already easy to queue files for later download for those with some amount of computer savvy. If your pricing plan came to pass, you can bet some really easy-to-use universal download queue would appear, probably saddled with spyware and advertisements, but it would get used anyway...And then they'd be even more overloaded at night than they are at any time now.
Yes, pirates can rip the disc so that it can be burned in the normal fashion (and they are doing this now), but this requires special software and knowledge that Joe Average doesn't have...
So basically you have a situation like the Dreamcast where things are basically in a custom format (even though its just a slight modification of the DVD format), as opposed to PS2 where games are in the standard DVD format. With a PS2 mod chip installed, I can backup DVDs on my own (again, rented from Blockbuster or borrowed from a friend or whatever) using standard DVDr and DVDr software...With an XBOX mod chip installed, I need to download the rips from online, I can't just make the copies myself unless I bother to learn the details of how things are stored and then go and write some very low level DVD data extraction software, at a minimum.
Whoever brought that up is full of shit. RMS is against software patents, period, end of story.
Yeah RMS isn't the entire FSF, but he basically sets the policy. And you won't find any official documentation or website backing up that claim that the FSF encourages patents on Free software.
Please refrain from passing along bogus info like that in the future unless you can back it up....
Hah!
These patents are wrong. Even if Red Hat doesn't ever sue anyone, they just add to the fear and confusion software developers will face when they go to implement similar concepts -- even in Open Source projects! And whose to say the Red Hat of 5 years from now, under new management, won't go and start suing projects that use these techniques now retroactively? This isn't a trademark..So they COULD do that..
Is Red Hat going to sign contracts with any software developers who wish to implement these techniques saying they WONT sue them in the future? If they don't, you HAVE to assume they WILL sue you sometime in the future, even if the current management has all the best intentions!
Trivial software patents are DEAD WRONG. These are trivial software patents. Red Hat is WRONG. They won't see money from me in the future, EVER unless they somehow alter this situation.
And the patent-for-protection argument doesn't hold water..All they'd have to do is publish these techiques in some public place (I'm sure one of the Linux journals would give them space for this) to ensure prior art is on record.
My guess is they want to get involved in the cross-patent licensing game... Which is simply evil in general and hurts OSS developers more than anyone.
In short, fuck you Red Hat.
ENOUGH Tivo!!
Stop with your LIES!!
And yes, I did 'get your point', but you can't exactly mention the name 'netscape' in any serious discussion over how badly programmed/bloated Microsoft's software is and get away with it...
Thus explaining why anyone would ever run Linux for anything...
Well that's where projects like WineX come in..Cleanroom implementations of the lower level libraries that will be used on whatever platform. Though as I mentioned in another post, there's no fucking way in hell anyone is ever going to use this technology to port a real-world modern game to the PS2...the technical issues are too numerous for me to repeat here again.
For the others (Quake & Lithtech engine games), the underlying engines were ported, with quite a lot of platform specific tweaking, to the PS2, with quite a lot of functionality cut out to deal with the fact that the PS2 has almost no memory to speak of (compared to even the lowest end bargain basement PC) and the fact that as the above posted mentioned, the architectures are very different. So, while you might have Lithtech PC and Lithtech PS2, and the API for LITHTECH is pretty much the same across both, that is not the case with a lower-level API like DirectX/Direct3D whose very software architecture makes extreme assumptions about the hardware architecture it is running on.
NOBODY is going to use this to 'port' commercial games run under the PS2, period...Not gonna happen, ever. If anyone does I WILL EAT MY COMPUTER and webcam it live for all to see.
The original poster's point stands..This might be nice for Linux and Mac users but its next to useless for the PS2, dunno why they even bother mentioning it.
Stop WITH YOUR LIES!!! LIAR!
Security aside (enough people posted on that), MMORPGs don't do much server side processing at all. All of the heavy lifting is the graphics display on the clients and the network bandwidth required. The CPU required on the backend is rather minimal, even for 1000s of players.
So this is not a very good idea.
Couldn't you?? Ass fucker?
Granted, you CAN achive the same thing on some older PS2 models by using a 'knife method' to trick the DVD tray into opening, but this will probably damage your PS2 even if done over a short term, and doesn't work correctly with newer model PS2s.
Not that I particularly care if anyone breaks the law in this case, but just be aware of that.
They actually did this same thing before, see "GTA: London" for the PC. Its basically an add-on pack for GTA3, in this case.
Not to mention that when you close the file, 5 more just like it pop up... and they aren't your average office files, they are the kind that blink !!
If you really hate stupid patents, fight against ALL of them, even the ones that might have short-term benefits! We can't afford to pick and choose the 'good stupid patents' from the 'bad stupid patents'.
I don't like Flash.
It still sucks.
If your problem is that your programmers are naming variables thusly, the issue is that the programmers are retards to begin with. Do you really think that someone who would so poorly name variables is going to bother writing useful comments? I'd fire a programmer who named variables iHateMyBoss but commented them well long before a programmer who used comments very conservatively but chose well named method & variable names.