Well, we'd get to keep DVD for several years while the next-next-gen media gets its act together. Which would suit me fine - and many people who won't benefit noticeably from the higher-resolutions of the two formats, but will be charged more for them.
My work machine is only a couple of years old, once IT load it up with anti-virus, license management and associated drag - I'm not sure it can run XP very well.
Ironically perhaps, by introducing this NGE to avoid scrap it and start again SOE may well have made at least the 'scrap it' part inevitable. A new SWG might be hard to justify based on their current success.
Regardless of the value of the NGE they fouled up the introduction at the managerial, marketing and PR level in almost every concievable way.
Then there are the three main changes that the NGE introduces:
1 - Manual aim combat: Actually is reasonably fun, interacts clumsily in with a large number of existing systems, but after a couple of months of live they've got most of them fixed. Not exactly challenging, and gets a bit dull after a while, but it's not terrible.
2 - Removal of vast amounts of indirect content: ie, all the complexity and interactions of the old class system. The result is easier to balance for them. It makes for a fairly bland and unoriginal gaming experience though. Kill stuff, level, get a few more HP and deal a little more damage. The heavily level-based balance doesn't really mesh with the old content either, so there are numerous dead-spots of XP.
3 - New Quests: These are ok, not as good as WoW, and are pretty dull to replay (there is effectively only one quest path in the game and it ends in the low 30's level wise). And you need an expansion to get to level 80, so you can buy an expansion to get to level 90, so you can.. er.. not much of an end game.
On the positive side, the PA's and Player Cities that survived the great exodus are generally the stronger and more stable for it for now, and it looks like with the next publish the game will again achieve the level of quality it had before NGE. Which wasn't that high, but generally wasn't as truly poor as people say. At least not after they hot-fixed the major foul-ups in the publishes.
I think this is unfair. The majority of the problems that trouble players day to day are entirely new one created since the game launched.
The Jedi Infestation, The (Revamped) Purposelessness of the Droid Engineer, The Eternally Postponed Combat Revamp..
But, if you consider the game far to bugged to play, then probably you need to increase your dosage. There are a vast and unmeasured sea of problems. But unless your terminally stressed and anal they aren't game-breakers.
As for JTL.. well NDA.
I think the point is:
If IE responded to bad HTML by showing a blank page, there would be less bad HTML in the world.
That doesn't excuse other browsers crashing, but it does mean that IE's behaviour is slighty better, not right.
Programming is not Science, it's not Art, it's Craft.
In the same way that most engineering disciplines (Civil, Mechanical) grew from craft to engineering via the application of science. Software is on it's way to becoming an engineering discipline but is not mature enough yet. Currently most 'methodology' techniques are little more than snake oil and alchemy.
We don't *need* to endanger the robots either. The economic benefits of knowing there was water on Mars are pretty limited.
Human beings aren't particularly necessary either for that matter. You don't buy health insurance for your family because they are *necessary*.
The argument that there are better things to spend the money on is always true for everything. Why waste all that money on making the old people live longer? Spend it on the middle-aged.. the young, the teenagers.. the children.. the babies.. the sick babies.. umpty-trillion for this single kid here before he dies! Quick!
There's nothing new here... Manned exploration is more expensive than unmanned.. unmanned can do most of what manned can.. no exploration at all can achieve a great deal of what unmanned can do.. spend the money on the Large Hadron Collider instead, or a new bio lab, or a new chemistry set for the President.
It's not going to get easier and cheaper unless we try - and it should be a worldwide effort, no need to rush (Man on Mars by 2010! er 2020! er.. can we have another Trillion dollars?) but we need to start right away.
The loss of lives just pushes research towards robots rather than manned spaceflight so your argument rather falls apart.
The loss of Columbia didn't prevent the two Mars Rovers being sent.
More likely, XBox2 will be incompatible, but there will be 'enhanced' ports of old games to the new platform. Using the old code base (mostly C++) this will create both a reasonable starting library of games and offer the chance for MS and games producers to milk a little more cash out of old titles cheaply.
You could previously download the binaries even if you were not a customer: they must continue to make the source available to such people or they lose the right to continue to distribute GPL source and binaries to anyone.
They might escape just by pointing to someone else's server if the source is available somewhere else.
I'm planning to set up a ftp site where you can freely download source and binaries of SCO's Unixware and other products.
It's all perfectly legal: You can only download if you agree to an additional license that allows you access to my proprietary IP that comprises part of the SCO products.
I can't tell you what that IP is, because I haven't looked. But I'm a pretty clever guy and there is bound to be something I've thought of in there- or at the very least something that I would have thought of had I bothered to think about it.
So a healthy economy is in the public interest, this isn't anything like the corporate interest being the public interest however.
Alternatively, since a healthy economy relies on the freedom of individials to make their own choices based on full and accurate information- whatever is in the public interest is in the corporate intrest, although often not in the interest of many corporations.
-Corporations live and die- the economy continues on. Any company that dies leaving a true hole to be exploited will be rapidly replaced in a healthy economy.
Surely in fact there will be an infinite number of people killed by the infinite variations of this asteroid across the infinite numbers of parallel universes?
On the other hand, If we could start a mission now to divert the asteroid we could help save an infinite number of lives (Since there will be an infinite number of parallel universes doing the same).
Although this would still mean that an infinite number of people would still die- but every little helps hey?
I just stuck SUSE 8.2 on an old laptop for someone who has used Windows 95, 98 and XP a little but no more than for a few hours a week.
It's got KDE installed as default, and currently uses KSpread & GRAMPS* for genealogical research. Now KSpread is KDE, GRAMPS is Gnome and the user is not really aware of any difference. She just gets on with it - Her considered opinion that is it's just a bit different and in some places easier to use than Windows. Kspread is particularly a hit because it works more the way she expects it to than Excel does.
This Linux isn't ready for the desktop stuff is getting old. Linux isn't ready for a non-techie computer user to install on an existing machine the moment anything the installer doesn't expect happens. Neither, to be perfectly honest, is Windows.- And stunning observation of the obvious: the majority of Windows licences aren't retail to direct to the consumer.
Linux and Windows are both perfectly capable of being equally usable on a pre-installed system, with carefully chosen hardware, a well thought out initial configuration and some over-the-phone support for the people who get confused between the network socket, the mains socket and the USB sockets.
Apple has the right perspective in that the majority of PC users look at their PC as just another piece of consumer electronics- it's a glorified TV/Games Console: For these people the operating system is a component as mysterious and unidentifiable as the hard-drive.
Linux won't conquer the desktop until it's a standard options when buying a PC and the cost of the hardware gets low enough that it competes on price, and the interoperability means that that is the only difference.
Samba, Wine, MS Office filters are the stuff that matters, not KDE vs Gnome battles- they're at the point where they fade into the background as part of the scenery: The standardisation of the KOffice file formats is the sort of thing we should be doing... And look it's being done.
* Kudos to those SUSE people who performed the non-trivial task of producing a GRAMPS rpm for SUSE 8.2 - it's working fine and a good example of what *doesn't* happen in windows land.
Well, I'd say you're missing the point that it's a crap solution. It assumes that fixed speed limits at fixed locations is the correct way to deal with people driving dangerously fast and then attempts to deal with it in a way that will only catch out the trivial offenders (Serious offenders- car thieves, joyriders, people prepared to break the law to break the law- those with most interest in breaking the speed limit with impunity- aren't going to worry too much). And it won't work very reliably for lights - a camera is vastly more effective: and should be fitted to every set of lights already IMO. (It would need to know exactly where you are at a precise moment of time, which direction you are travelling, the state of the lights and the precise position of the line).
Also it would be fun when someone breaks down blocking the road- the system has no discrection so people will have the option of just stopping and waiting until the police turn up and disable the reciever, repair the offending vehicle (or ask an illegally parked vehicle to move)- or resign yourself to fighting the resulting fine in court.
And then there is the road rage as people with different opinions on the best choice discuss vigorously the different options.
Setting up the infrastructure will be hugely expensive, chipping cars will be a nice little back-alley sideline, it may stop people speeding in some cases, but it won't be certain that they will drive at a safe speed for the circumstances but the coverage will be spotty (see 'expensive')
A better solution, if the aim was to slow cars down rather than a scheme that needs to generate cash to pay for itself (ie a scheme that needs a minimum number of offences to be effective)- Would be fitting cars with appropriate sensors and software to generate warning when the speed is excessive, according to conditions.
It's dark, raining and the air temp is below freezing- your driving in a designated urban area: warning lights flash if you go over 15.
It's warm, sunny, the sky is clear, the traffic is light, you're on a nice long stretch of motorway/freeway/autobahn, your car is highly rated for safe handling, no warnings until you get well over 90.
The chip logs the time,place and conditions of warnings, everytime you get a service the data is downloaded and anonimised, and added to a national database on driver behaviour. This is used to update and upgrade the safety recommendations the system makes by correlating accidents, conditions, locations and warnings.
If there is spot that's hot for accidents and people ignoring warnings, the police can monitor it and stop people they consider to be driving dangerously considering the conditions. Your own car chip can be used as evidence, either in your support or against you.
If you were in an accident then the car's recent memory can help establish the cause, if you were doing 110 in outside a school they're not going to even need it to prosecute you, if the nominal limit was 30, you were doing 25, but the car was warning because it noted that the school would be emptying at that time- then you're going to have to justify your behaviour. (It would have to be assumed that a warning is advice not legally binding- but ignoring that warning without reason would be 'careless driving')
Harder, not flawless, but a better compromise and quite possibly more effective at improving overall driving quality.
Thats what it is.. SCO is reckons if it makes enough of a fuss, screaming and stamping it's feet like a spoilt toddler that eventually, and against their better judgement, IBM will say 'sod it', and give Dull McBribe a $300million lollipop just to shut him up.
I don't think that's likely to happen. IBM can already tell that Dull has been screaming and screaming for long enough that he's starting to get tired and sulky and running out of things to accuse them of. Soon SCO will just run out of those little green bit's of paper that have been keeping him going and suddenly all will be quiet.
This just goes to show: you shouldn't supply the immature with crack.
How much does having a decent lawyer to inspect every license cost? (Including the click throughs provided by updates & patches?)
How much does translating that information into the policies you have to keep them in line with the individual licencing requirements cost?
You do do that don't you?
Otherwise your confidence is being able to face a BSA audit might be a little misplaced...
I agree that total passivity isn't the right response. I'd really like to see owners of code under the GPL distributed by SCO (Samba for example), ask for either confirmation that SCO accepts the terms of the GPL for that software or stop shipping it.
This doesn't require revoking anyones rights under the GPL (if SCO accept the terms they can ship, but it's going to look a little odd in court- if they don't accept the terms then either they stop shipping or they violate copyright: the GPL doesn't really come into it).
Such letters would also count against any claim the GPL==PD that SCO might like to make because the copyright owners are attempting protect their rights.
I knew I should have written some wonderful utility and GPL'd it just so I could send the letter.
If SCO don't believe the GPL is legal, then they cannot accept it, if they cannot accept it then they can't redistribute legally.
They can download, use and modify.. But they can't distribute.
Unless they believe that but putting something under the GPL you are putting it into the public domain: Since this is obviously not the intent of the GPL or the people using it that would be a very aggressive line to take.
I think you may have missed the point there: If SCO believes the GPL is not valid, then they must also believe that distributing code that is intended to be covered by the GPL is actually an infringement of copyright.
If SCO distribute GPL software and believe the license doesn't count they are, according to their logic, illegally copying software.
So it would be entirely reasonable for copyright owners of such software to send SCO a legal C&D stating, essentially: "Either confirm in writing you recognise the validity of the GPL on this software, or stop distributing it"
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Well, we'd get to keep DVD for several years while the next-next-gen media gets its act together. Which would suit me fine - and many people who won't benefit noticeably from the higher-resolutions of the two formats, but will be charged more for them.
My work machine is only a couple of years old, once IT load it up with anti-virus, license management and associated drag - I'm not sure it can run XP very well.
EU airlines in US Courts, US Software companies in EU courts - I'm prepared to predict how this might go.
Ironically perhaps, by introducing this NGE to avoid scrap it and start again SOE may well have made at least the 'scrap it' part inevitable. A new SWG might be hard to justify based on their current success. Regardless of the value of the NGE they fouled up the introduction at the managerial, marketing and PR level in almost every concievable way. Then there are the three main changes that the NGE introduces: 1 - Manual aim combat: Actually is reasonably fun, interacts clumsily in with a large number of existing systems, but after a couple of months of live they've got most of them fixed. Not exactly challenging, and gets a bit dull after a while, but it's not terrible. 2 - Removal of vast amounts of indirect content: ie, all the complexity and interactions of the old class system. The result is easier to balance for them. It makes for a fairly bland and unoriginal gaming experience though. Kill stuff, level, get a few more HP and deal a little more damage. The heavily level-based balance doesn't really mesh with the old content either, so there are numerous dead-spots of XP. 3 - New Quests: These are ok, not as good as WoW, and are pretty dull to replay (there is effectively only one quest path in the game and it ends in the low 30's level wise). And you need an expansion to get to level 80, so you can buy an expansion to get to level 90, so you can.. er.. not much of an end game. On the positive side, the PA's and Player Cities that survived the great exodus are generally the stronger and more stable for it for now, and it looks like with the next publish the game will again achieve the level of quality it had before NGE. Which wasn't that high, but generally wasn't as truly poor as people say. At least not after they hot-fixed the major foul-ups in the publishes.
Duck?
Think about it a step further along..
Suspect A lies under polygraph implicating Suspect B - polygraph indicates he's telling the truth.
Suspect B is interviewed, shown 'proof' that he committed the crime, offered a deal..
False negatives can be just as dangerous if they are believed..
I think this is unfair. The majority of the problems that trouble players day to day are entirely new one created since the game launched. The Jedi Infestation, The (Revamped) Purposelessness of the Droid Engineer, The Eternally Postponed Combat Revamp.. But, if you consider the game far to bugged to play, then probably you need to increase your dosage. There are a vast and unmeasured sea of problems. But unless your terminally stressed and anal they aren't game-breakers. As for JTL.. well NDA.
I think the point is: If IE responded to bad HTML by showing a blank page, there would be less bad HTML in the world. That doesn't excuse other browsers crashing, but it does mean that IE's behaviour is slighty better, not right.
Programming is not Science, it's not Art, it's Craft. In the same way that most engineering disciplines (Civil, Mechanical) grew from craft to engineering via the application of science. Software is on it's way to becoming an engineering discipline but is not mature enough yet. Currently most 'methodology' techniques are little more than snake oil and alchemy.
Hell, they usually need a pace-maker because their heart rate is a little to randomly variable.
We don't *need* to endanger the robots either. The economic benefits of knowing there was water on Mars are pretty limited.
Human beings aren't particularly necessary either for that matter. You don't buy health insurance for your family because they are *necessary*.
The argument that there are better things to spend the money on is always true for everything. Why waste all that money on making the old people live longer? Spend it on the middle-aged.. the young, the teenagers.. the children.. the babies.. the sick babies.. umpty-trillion for this single kid here before he dies! Quick!
There's nothing new here... Manned exploration is more expensive than unmanned.. unmanned can do most of what manned can.. no exploration at all can achieve a great deal of what unmanned can do.. spend the money on the Large Hadron Collider instead, or a new bio lab, or a new chemistry set for the President.
It's not going to get easier and cheaper unless we try - and it should be a worldwide effort, no need to rush (Man on Mars by 2010! er 2020! er.. can we have another Trillion dollars?) but we need to start right away.
The loss of lives just pushes research towards robots rather than manned spaceflight so your argument rather falls apart. The loss of Columbia didn't prevent the two Mars Rovers being sent.
Interesting that the 'Best' MMO is always the one that will be released next.
More likely, XBox2 will be incompatible, but there will be 'enhanced' ports of old games to the new platform. Using the old code base (mostly C++) this will create both a reasonable starting library of games and offer the chance for MS and games producers to milk a little more cash out of old titles cheaply.
You could previously download the binaries even if you were not a customer: they must continue to make the source available to such people or they lose the right to continue to distribute GPL source and binaries to anyone.
They might escape just by pointing to someone else's server if the source is available somewhere else.
I'm planning to set up a ftp site where you can freely download source and binaries of SCO's Unixware and other products.
It's all perfectly legal: You can only download if you agree to an additional license that allows you access to my proprietary IP that comprises part of the SCO products.
I can't tell you what that IP is, because I haven't looked. But I'm a pretty clever guy and there is bound to be something I've thought of in there- or at the very least something that I would have thought of had I bothered to think about it.
-- Learning from SCO one Crime at a Time.
Capitalism is the spoon, not the soup.
So a healthy economy is in the public interest, this isn't anything like the corporate interest being the public interest however.
Alternatively, since a healthy economy relies on the freedom of individials to make their own choices based on full and accurate information- whatever is in the public interest is in the corporate intrest, although often not in the interest of many corporations.
-Corporations live and die- the economy continues on. Any company that dies leaving a true hole to be exploited will be rapidly replaced in a healthy economy.
Surely in fact there will be an infinite number of people killed by the infinite variations of this asteroid across the infinite numbers of parallel universes?
On the other hand, If we could start a mission now to divert the asteroid we could help save an infinite number of lives (Since there will be an infinite number of parallel universes doing the same).
Although this would still mean that an infinite number of people would still die- but every little helps hey?
I just stuck SUSE 8.2 on an old laptop for someone who has used Windows 95, 98 and XP a little but no more than for a few hours a week.
It's got KDE installed as default, and currently uses KSpread & GRAMPS* for genealogical research. Now KSpread is KDE, GRAMPS is Gnome and the user is not really aware of any difference. She just gets on with it - Her considered opinion that is it's just a bit different and in some places easier to use than Windows. Kspread is particularly a hit because it works more the way she expects it to than Excel does.
This Linux isn't ready for the desktop stuff is getting old. Linux isn't ready for a non-techie computer user to install on an existing machine the moment anything the installer doesn't expect happens. Neither, to be perfectly honest, is Windows.- And stunning observation of the obvious: the majority of Windows licences aren't retail to direct to the consumer.
Linux and Windows are both perfectly capable of being equally usable on a pre-installed system, with carefully chosen hardware, a well thought out initial configuration and some over-the-phone support for the people who get confused between the network socket, the mains socket and the USB sockets.
Apple has the right perspective in that the majority of PC users look at their PC as just another piece of consumer electronics- it's a glorified TV/Games Console: For these people the operating system is a component as mysterious and unidentifiable as the hard-drive.
Linux won't conquer the desktop until it's a standard options when buying a PC and the cost of the hardware gets low enough that it competes on price, and the interoperability means that that is the only difference.
Samba, Wine, MS Office filters are the stuff that matters, not KDE vs Gnome battles- they're at the point where they fade into the background as part of the scenery: The standardisation of the KOffice file formats is the sort of thing we should be doing... And look it's being done.
* Kudos to those SUSE people who performed the non-trivial task of producing a GRAMPS rpm for SUSE 8.2 - it's working fine and a good example of what *doesn't* happen in windows land.
Well, I'd say you're missing the point that it's a crap solution. It assumes that fixed speed limits at fixed locations is the correct way to deal with people driving dangerously fast and then attempts to deal with it in a way that will only catch out the trivial offenders (Serious offenders- car thieves, joyriders, people prepared to break the law to break the law- those with most interest in breaking the speed limit with impunity- aren't going to worry too much). And it won't work very reliably for lights - a camera is vastly more effective: and should be fitted to every set of lights already IMO. (It would need to know exactly where you are at a precise moment of time, which direction you are travelling, the state of the lights and the precise position of the line).
Also it would be fun when someone breaks down blocking the road- the system has no discrection so people will have the option of just stopping and waiting until the police turn up and disable the reciever, repair the offending vehicle (or ask an illegally parked vehicle to move)- or resign yourself to fighting the resulting fine in court. And then there is the road rage as people with different opinions on the best choice discuss vigorously the different options.
Setting up the infrastructure will be hugely expensive, chipping cars will be a nice little back-alley sideline, it may stop people speeding in some cases, but it won't be certain that they will drive at a safe speed for the circumstances but the coverage will be spotty (see 'expensive')
A better solution, if the aim was to slow cars down rather than a scheme that needs to generate cash to pay for itself (ie a scheme that needs a minimum number of offences to be effective)- Would be fitting cars with appropriate sensors and software to generate warning when the speed is excessive, according to conditions.
It's dark, raining and the air temp is below freezing- your driving in a designated urban area: warning lights flash if you go over 15.
It's warm, sunny, the sky is clear, the traffic is light, you're on a nice long stretch of motorway/freeway/autobahn, your car is highly rated for safe handling, no warnings until you get well over 90.
The chip logs the time,place and conditions of warnings, everytime you get a service the data is downloaded and anonimised, and added to a national database on driver behaviour. This is used to update and upgrade the safety recommendations the system makes by correlating accidents, conditions, locations and warnings.
If there is spot that's hot for accidents and people ignoring warnings, the police can monitor it and stop people they consider to be driving dangerously considering the conditions. Your own car chip can be used as evidence, either in your support or against you.
If you were in an accident then the car's recent memory can help establish the cause, if you were doing 110 in outside a school they're not going to even need it to prosecute you, if the nominal limit was 30, you were doing 25, but the car was warning because it noted that the school would be emptying at that time- then you're going to have to justify your behaviour. (It would have to be assumed that a warning is advice not legally binding- but ignoring that warning without reason would be 'careless driving')
Harder, not flawless, but a better compromise and quite possibly more effective at improving overall driving quality.
Thats what it is.. SCO is reckons if it makes enough of a fuss, screaming and stamping it's feet like a spoilt toddler that eventually, and against their better judgement, IBM will say 'sod it', and give Dull McBribe a $300million lollipop just to shut him up.
I don't think that's likely to happen. IBM can already tell that Dull has been screaming and screaming for long enough that he's starting to get tired and sulky and running out of things to accuse them of. Soon SCO will just run out of those little green bit's of paper that have been keeping him going and suddenly all will be quiet.
This just goes to show: you shouldn't supply the immature with crack.
How much does having a decent lawyer to inspect every license cost? (Including the click throughs provided by updates & patches?) How much does translating that information into the policies you have to keep them in line with the individual licencing requirements cost?
You do do that don't you?
Otherwise your confidence is being able to face a BSA audit might be a little misplaced...
I agree that total passivity isn't the right response. I'd really like to see owners of code under the GPL distributed by SCO (Samba for example), ask for either confirmation that SCO accepts the terms of the GPL for that software or stop shipping it. This doesn't require revoking anyones rights under the GPL (if SCO accept the terms they can ship, but it's going to look a little odd in court- if they don't accept the terms then either they stop shipping or they violate copyright: the GPL doesn't really come into it).
Such letters would also count against any claim the GPL==PD that SCO might like to make because the copyright owners are attempting protect their rights.
I knew I should have written some wonderful utility and GPL'd it just so I could send the letter.
If SCO don't believe the GPL is legal, then they cannot accept it, if they cannot accept it then they can't redistribute legally.
They can download, use and modify.. But they can't distribute.
Unless they believe that but putting something under the GPL you are putting it into the public domain: Since this is obviously not the intent of the GPL or the people using it that would be a very aggressive line to take.
I think you may have missed the point there: If SCO believes the GPL is not valid, then they must also believe that distributing code that is intended to be covered by the GPL is actually an infringement of copyright.
If SCO distribute GPL software and believe the license doesn't count they are, according to their logic, illegally copying software.
So it would be entirely reasonable for copyright owners of such software to send SCO a legal C&D stating, essentially: "Either confirm in writing you recognise the validity of the GPL on this software, or stop distributing it"