One thing you have to remember is that 500k people signed up in TWO DAYS. They decided to cap the number of sign ups at 500k. So, they probably could have 1-2 million (or more) sign ups had they not capped them at 500k.
Sony has said that the PS3 will be complete in 2005. So, we probably won't see the PS3 although 2006, which gives the PS3 three more year, or about 6 (7?) year total lifespan for the PS2, which is about right for a console lifespan.
Keep in mind that the PS3 will be backwards compatible with all previous generations of the Playstation so those game libraries will not be lost. Also, they really don't want MS to beat them to punch with the Y Box or whatever they are planning to release as the follow up to the X Box.
I'm not sure where you get this idea from. Reverse engineering the driver from the binary is hard to say the least. A video card driver is actually a pretty complex piece of software and it would probably cost ATI and the like a considerable investment to reverse engineer. Futhermore, by the time the driver was successfully reverse engineered the code would be outdated.
Nvidia takes great pride in their video card drivers. They don't just give them away for two reasons:
1) There are some licensing issues with parts of the code that make it legally impossilbe to release the code under an open source license. 2) There are almost certainly trade secrets in those drivers. There drivers give their cards a non-trivial performance boost, and are very stable.
Basically, Nvidia really does not have much to gain by open sourcing the drivers. They support linux, so they really are supporting every platform they can feasibly.
Another thing is that they might not want anyone else messing with their driver code. They do not want to gain a bad reputation by taking modifying their code and releasing a sub-par driver even if it is for an unsupported platform.
If you want to kill the Xbox instead of buying one and never getting one game... take your $300 and pick up a GameCube with Super Smash Brothers and Pikmin.
Um, not exactly. Id software is a corporation therefore the owners (Carmack etc... I don't know who owns it...) each own stock in the company. However, it is not publicly traded.
Id is not being hypocritical by releasing quake for linux, but not making it open source. Just because they want to support linux does not mean they have to support the concept of open source. Personally I think that they would be stupid to make quake open source. Why? Because they already have a far superior engine to that of any other 3d game. They can still make money by licensing that enigine (Id is a corporation after all... their goal is to make money not satisfy a small minority...).
Also Id does release enough information about quake so that you can make damn near any modification you want, so I don't really see what the difference is. Sure it would be nice if Id released the source code for the whole game, but it's not really to their advantage since they have no reason to manage the code any longer. They don't want to make any major changes to the game after its released, and generally only release bug patches after the games come out.
I think you missed one of the most fundamental points of American Government. We DO NOT have a majority rule government. Never had, hopefully, never will. Our founding fathers did much to prevent what they called a tyranny of the majority. That's one of the reasons Congress moves so damn slow, it was designed to keep people from acting on emotion.
Furhtermore, who cares if it is there money? Would the converse hold true if legions people showed up and decided to turn library into a place where you could only read non-fiction because they felt fiction was worthless? Of course not, that doesn't make any sense. The fact that these people pay for the libraries does not mean they should have total control over their library, anymore than they should have total control over any other part of government. The descions made by government must not infringe in any upon the rights of the MINORITY, no matter how small that minority may be. Just because you do not approve of them having that right, does not empower you to take it away from them.
The true problem with censorware is that it asks computers to make a moral judgement, something that right now they happen to not be very good at. Those that support censorware see it as this boon that will allow them to filter out the porn and smut on the Internet, and make sure that no child sees it. They do not understand that censorware not only overblocks sites, but even more disturbing, underblocks them. Censorware often does not even do what it is supposed to do; protect children from pornography.
I think that we can all agree that people should not be allowed to view pornography at public libraries. Therefore, some sort of measure needs to be taken from stopping people from doing so, and in reality not a lot truly needs to be done. I doubt that it is very common place for people to go to their local library and view porn. I think that two things need to happen: censorware proponents need to be educated on how ineffective censorware is, and also we need to pass a law simply making it illegal to view porn at a public library. This would be just as effective as censorware, not to mention cheaper, and would have the added bonus of not drawing us one step closer to the world of Orwell's 1984.
It just depends, if you are talking about the economy conservatives want less intervention (think true capitalism), while the other hand, when it comes to social and moral issues, conservative want more goverment regulation and restrictions.
I don't think that by giving the money back they eredeemed themselves. People are too self-cenetered to care about that. All they noticed was that they couldn't access their e-mail. M$ really will not gain any credibility from paying him back, because most people would expect them to that. The oly way they can redeem themselves in the eye of the consummer is to find a way to make up for the outage, which is difficult since this is free service.
I find it rather amusing that one linux progammer managed to beat out an entire team of M$ employees in diagnosing and fixing a problem. It only adds to it that the problem was that M$ forget to pay a #$35 dollar fee.
I don't understand the purpose of taking id to court. At best, in a criminal court, they would be convicted guilty, and they would have to pay a fine. Considering that id software has responded back admitting that they collect information from your computer with an explanation of why, I doubt that a judge would levy a very heavy fine on them either. In civil court I doubt you will get anywhere. I assume the purpose of this would be to seek monetary damages. But how exactly have you been damaged? The mental anguish over your comprised security... That's not going to work well. Seriously, do you really think you are going to win a huge lawsuit over this? I doubt it, besides most of it will go to those damn lawyers anyways...
There is no reason to jump all over Id software's case... It probably never occured to them that people would get so bent out of shape over this. They admit to the fact that they are taking information from our computers, and they have told us why. What more do you want from them? It's not like id is taking information that you would have gladly volunteered.
The community should making an effort to educate companies about this and not flaming them into oblivion. Besides, even if we did sue id, I doubt we would win anything more that they have to put up on their webpage a warning that q3 retrieves various information about your hardware. No cash.
Also, now correct me if I'm wrong on this... don't cookies have a similar function, i.e. they take data from your computer without your knowledge? Wouldn't that also qualify as being illegal? I don't really understand what the difference is.
This will only hurt the internet
on
License to Surf
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· Score: 1
The problem with making such a change is that if people think that their privacy is going to be severely compromised by using the net, they won't use it. Many people are afraid enough of computers and the internet without having the added fear that someone is tracking their every move ready to sell it to the government, their employer, or their next door neighbor. Surfing the net comes with no more responsibilities than reading a book or watching the TV, and has to certain degree the same content. There is no reason to have to have a license to surf the net other than to strip away our privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing you have to remember is that 500k people signed up in TWO DAYS. They decided to cap the number of sign ups at 500k. So, they probably could have 1-2 million (or more) sign ups had they not capped them at 500k.
Sony has said that the PS3 will be complete in 2005. So, we probably won't see the PS3 although 2006, which gives the PS3 three more year, or about 6 (7?) year total lifespan for the PS2, which is about right for a console lifespan.
Keep in mind that the PS3 will be backwards compatible with all previous generations of the Playstation so those game libraries will not be lost. Also, they really don't want MS to beat them to punch with the Y Box or whatever they are planning to release as the follow up to the X Box.
any competitor can reverse engineer the driver.
I'm not sure where you get this idea from. Reverse engineering the driver from the binary is hard to say the least. A video card driver is actually a pretty complex piece of software and it would probably cost ATI and the like a considerable investment to reverse engineer. Futhermore, by the time the driver was successfully reverse engineered the code would be outdated.
Nvidia takes great pride in their video card drivers. They don't just give them away for two reasons:
1) There are some licensing issues with parts of the code that make it legally impossilbe to release the code under an open source license.
2) There are almost certainly trade secrets in those drivers. There drivers give their cards a non-trivial performance boost, and are very stable.
Basically, Nvidia really does not have much to gain by open sourcing the drivers. They support linux, so they really are supporting every platform they can feasibly.
Another thing is that they might not want anyone else messing with their driver code. They do not want to gain a bad reputation by taking modifying their code and releasing a sub-par driver even if it is for an unsupported platform.
If you want to kill the Xbox instead of buying one and never getting one game... take your $300 and pick up a GameCube with Super Smash Brothers and Pikmin.
Um, not exactly. Id software is a corporation therefore the owners (Carmack etc... I don't know who owns it...) each own stock in the company. However, it is not publicly traded.
Id is not being hypocritical by releasing quake for linux, but not making it open source. Just because they want to support linux does not mean they have to support the concept of open source. Personally I think that they would be stupid to make quake open source. Why? Because they already have a far superior engine to that of any other 3d game. They can still make money by licensing that enigine (Id is a corporation after all... their goal is to make money not satisfy a small minority...).
Also Id does release enough information about quake so that you can make damn near any modification you want, so I don't really see what the difference is. Sure it would be nice if Id released the source code for the whole game, but it's not really to their advantage since they have no reason to manage the code any longer. They don't want to make any major changes to the game after its released, and generally only release bug patches after the games come out.
I think you missed one of the most fundamental points of American Government. We DO NOT have a majority rule government. Never had, hopefully, never will. Our founding fathers did much to prevent what they called a tyranny of the majority. That's one of the reasons Congress moves so damn slow, it was designed to keep people from acting on emotion.
Furhtermore, who cares if it is there money? Would the converse hold true if legions people showed up and decided to turn library into a place where you could only read non-fiction because they felt fiction was worthless? Of course not, that doesn't make any sense. The fact that these people pay for the libraries does not mean they should have total control over their library, anymore than they should have total control over any other part of government. The descions made by government must not infringe in any upon the rights of the MINORITY, no matter how small that minority may be. Just because you do not approve of them having that right, does not empower you to take it away from them.
The true problem with censorware is that it asks computers to make a moral judgement, something that right now they happen to not be very good at. Those that support censorware see it as this boon that will allow them to filter out the porn and smut on the Internet, and make sure that no child sees it. They do not understand that censorware not only overblocks sites, but even more disturbing, underblocks them. Censorware often does not even do what it is supposed to do; protect children from pornography.
I think that we can all agree that people should not be allowed to view pornography at public libraries. Therefore, some sort of measure needs to be taken from stopping people from doing so, and in reality not a lot truly needs to be done. I doubt that it is very common place for people to go to their local library and view porn. I think that two things need to happen: censorware proponents need to be educated on how ineffective censorware is, and also we need to pass a law simply making it illegal to view porn at a public library. This would be just as effective as censorware, not to mention cheaper, and would have the added bonus of not drawing us one step closer to the world of Orwell's 1984.
It just depends, if you are talking about the economy conservatives want less intervention (think true capitalism), while the other hand, when it comes to social and moral issues, conservative want more goverment regulation and restrictions.
I don't think that by giving the money back they eredeemed themselves. People are too self-cenetered to care about that. All they noticed was that they couldn't access their e-mail. M$ really will not gain any credibility from paying him back, because most people would expect them to that. The oly way they can redeem themselves in the eye of the consummer is to find a way to make up for the outage, which is difficult since this is free service.
I find it rather amusing that one linux progammer managed to beat out an entire team of M$ employees in diagnosing and fixing a problem. It only adds to it that the problem was that M$ forget to pay a #$35 dollar fee.
I don't understand the purpose of taking id to court. At best, in a criminal court, they would be convicted guilty, and they would have to pay a fine. Considering that id software has responded back admitting that they collect information from your computer with an explanation of why, I doubt that a judge would levy a very heavy fine on them either. In civil court I doubt you will get anywhere. I assume the purpose of this would be to seek monetary damages. But how exactly have you been damaged? The mental anguish over your comprised security... That's not going to work well. Seriously, do you really think you are going to win a huge lawsuit over this? I doubt it, besides most of it will go to those damn lawyers anyways...
There is no reason to jump all over Id software's case... It probably never occured to them that people would get so bent out of shape over this. They admit to the fact that they are taking information from our computers, and they have told us why. What more do you want from them? It's not like id is taking information that you would have gladly volunteered.
The community should making an effort to educate companies about this and not flaming them into oblivion. Besides, even if we did sue id, I doubt we would win anything more that they have to put up on their webpage a warning that q3 retrieves various information about your hardware. No cash.
Also, now correct me if I'm wrong on this... don't cookies have a similar function, i.e. they take data from your computer without your knowledge? Wouldn't that also qualify as being illegal? I don't really understand what the difference is.
The problem with making such a change is that if people think that their privacy is going to be severely compromised by using the net, they won't use it. Many people are afraid enough of computers and the internet without having the added fear that someone is tracking their every move ready to sell it to the government, their employer, or their next door neighbor. Surfing the net comes with no more responsibilities than reading a book or watching the TV, and has to certain degree the same content. There is no reason to have to have a license to surf the net other than to strip away our privacy.