Much as I'd love to see a Gov't move to OSS, I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be another bait'n'switch to get Microsoft to give 'em some discounts
Keep in mind that even discounts help Linux by hurting Microsoft.
I know for a fact that the company I work has over the years written a large number of pieces of software for the ATO using, vb and.net. Now simply the cost of moving over these third party software pieces would make any more away from microsoft extremely difficult.
I still can't figure out why customers don't try to factor in cost of lock-in. The only reason I can think of is that perhaps PHBs don't look at anything but information from software vendors, and software vendors are unlikely to include lock-in cost estimates.
I'm also thrilled to see the Brazilian government taking steps toward independence from Redmond (and, indirectly, the US Government-- everyone down here remembers the "NSA Key" very clearly) by moving toward F/OSS.
How do you feel about the NSA-developed SELinux extensions that are being added to distros all over the place?
No, but if they had been running redundant systems elsewhere with no illegitimate services (if such services did exist), they would have had a legal solution that would have both fulfilled the ToS and the FBI's wants.
Why would FBI agents even be in Sweden? FBI jurisdiction extends only to domestic issues. Foreign issues are for the CIA to deal with.
Of course, the current end-run around those restrictions is the creation of the Office of Homeland Security, which has the powers of the FBI *and* CIA (and some of the INS) and none of the restrictions.
The problem is the ratio of times that terrorists are *really* involved.
How many major terror acts are perpetrated or confounded each year relative to how much we've seen "The War on Terror" used to justify anything and everything anyone can get away with. Funding for every agency under the sun derives from whether they're combatting terror. The DOE needs money "to combat terror" by developing methods to protect our utility grid. The DoD needs funds to "help combat terrorism" by developing new monitoring and data-mining technologies. The CDC needs money to "help combat terror" by producing vaccines. I'll bet that even the Department of Agriculture has funding initiatives based on "terror" somewhere -- maybe they want to monitor use of crop dusters, who knows.
It's freaking ridiculous. The "War on Terror" certainly saves lives, but the amount of resources that have been claimed in its name *vastly* outweigh the amount of damage that terrorism has done to us. A lot more people lost their lives to car crashes in 2001 than to terrorist attacks. Did we have black helicopters ready to swoop down on speeders? How about long-range alcohol sensors? What about armed guards at strategically-placed toll booths that search cars and people thoroughly for any kind of alcohol? All these sorts of things have been done in the name of "The War on Terror", instead of being used in an area where more American lives are being lost. The "War on Terror" is, frankly, a tool based in fear to help manipulate the masses. It has little practical value.
I claim that terrorism on the order of at 200:1 life amplification (roughly what the 9/11 terrorists achived -- something like 4000 lives to around 20 terrorists) cannot be eliminated without massively curtailing and altering a free society. There are just too many ways for a person willing to die to kill many people.
I would like to point out that people are only willing to throw their lives away if they are incredibly upset over something you've done. You don't see Iceland coming under terror attacks, because Iceland doesn't anger people to the point of being willing to die to kill Icelanders (or whatever a citizen of Iceland is called).
We have spent masses of money and effort on trying to figure out how to crush terror rings, on making people so afraid to resist the United States that they won't dream of it. The problem is, it can't be done. The Soviets couldn't crush resistance with years of secret police and encouraging children to inform on their parents. I don't think Bush Junior can do so in our society. Sheer force and fear just don't work when you're dealing with people who are willing to lose their lives to kill. You have no cards that they are interested in.
How much money has been spent on diplomatic and social solutions to eliminating terrorism? Supposedly the United States has a negative image in Islamic countries -- how much work have we gone through to improve that image? How much effort has gone into determining the things that are making people so angry that they are willing to *die* to hurt citizens in the US and resolve those issues?
A lot of people feel that trying to resolve things peacefully would be "giving in to the terrorists", and encourage future terrorist acts. I don't agree. The only value to a hard-core refusal to ever attempt peaceful solutions is as an attempt to establish prescedent governing future acts -- that no terrorist would ever be willing to attack the United States if it was *guaranteed* that doing so would hurt his cause, and damn the consequences to us in hurting that cause. The problem is, the prescedent has clearly not been established during the time we have taken a hard-line approach. The United States was attacked several times, despite having followed tough guidelines for dealing with terrorism in the past.
I'm curious as to what would happen if the 70 billion or whatever dollars that are being spent to keep us in Iraq (which at least originally was supposed
You might be able to eliminate blurring with a lens aparatus to increase light gather and a strobe (perhaps an IR strobe for working in normal conditions without driving people bananas -- not sure whether we have IR sources that can strobe yet).
Another possibility -- if you *know* that you're going to be using the camera for video capture, and cost isn't an issue, you can put high-quality accelerometers and other angle and position-locating devices into the thing.
There is software to achieve much of this. You'd just need to stream video elsewhere.
Frankly, I think it's reasonable to require all personnel in secure areas to leave their cell phones at a holding area, and provide them with special secure internal-use-only phone-type devices while they are within the facility. Cell phones have an increasing range of security issues.
I notice that Mann's work appears to deal with flat scenes-mobile camera, or stationary camera-arbitrary scene.
Do you know what state-of-the-art in 3d model building is? Is there effective work on arbitrary camera, arbitrary scene?
I know that CMU has a bunch of work that can pull off some of this, but I think that it may be special-cased (i.e. determining the location of the camera using other methods) and may have sensors other than vision (like laser range finders and the like) involved.
On the other hand, I don't think that the story submitter had the right to get the link to the story accepted. Dammit, Slashdot editors *normally* don't allow links to stories that require jumping through hoops to read, but they grandfather news sources in. At one point, the NYT didn't require registration, so they got in. At one point, Salon wasn't a pain in the ass to read, and so it got in.
I'd like to see Salon and the NYT removed from the "special pass" list.
Re:For anyone too lazy to read the entire article.
on
Orwellian Tech Support
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And yet, how often does said geek receive money, food, sex, or return expertise for (sometimes) hours of work and expertise?
I'll bet doctors get a lot of the same. "Say, Fred, my arm's been hurting and I figured that while you were here..."
I could happily live with no tech support -- there are a few ISPs that do this. You can cancel or order an account, and that's all they purport to do. They give you a slip of paper with the information you need, and if you have trouble configuring your email client, well, that's your problem. Of course, it means that you don't have to pay for the tech support that you never use anyway.
Okay, "frequently" may be overkill.:-) I was trying to drive home the point that it's not unreasonable.
Say you want to do up a spreadsheet containing some tables that contain data based on random data. You *could* either include fifteen megs or whatever of random numbers, or you could just include a random number function with a seed if your spreadsheet uses a standard RNG. As long as the variability with different seeds isn't significant for your work, you shouldn't have a problem. However, you *may* have insignificant digits shifting around in your table, which doesn't look all that professional (a bunch of different people with slightly different tables).
The other major use for pseudo-random numbers with a known seed that I can think of off-the-cuff is in finding problems between two environments. Say Bob has a copy of Excel 98 and you have a copy of Excel 2003, and for some reason Bob is getting different numbers than you are. Possibly you're relying on something that you shouldn't (i.e. Bob has an old version of some other file that this one uses), or perhaps Microsoft broke something between versions. If you can fix the seeds, you can find where the divergence is creeping in. If you can't fix the seed, then you have no way of finding and fixing what's wrong.
Sorry, that should be "ACLS still are not standard in the UNIX world".
Fedora Core 1 still, I think, does not use ACLs (by default). Most software doesn't understand ACLs. I've heard a lot of disparaging comments made on LKML about POSIX ACL design -- not sure how accurate it is, but it's there.
If I'm writing something, I can't just use ACLs and assume that they'll be there for the BSD, the Linux, the Solaris, the OS X users of my software.
/dev/urandom is not/dev/random. When the entropy pool is exhausted (which will happen extremely quickly if producing a large set of random numbers for statistical work), instead of blocking it will use a hash algorithm./dev/urandom varies unpredictably between being unpredictable and being very unpredictable.
On the other hand, when doing a study, frequently you *do* want to be able to use the same seed to produce exactly the same results. This is a legitimate failing in gnumeric. Not all random numbers are created equal.:-)
For what it's worth, I did (simple) analysis of a large set of random number generators for a high school science fair project. The Microsoft RNG (which has been used ever since at least early QBASIC days) is pretty decent, at least from a uniformity standpoint.
Keep in mind that inertia works both ways. Yes, there's a lot of folks that don't want to move. However, it's equally difficult (possibly worse) for Microsoft to regain any customers that do move. Also, actual movement tends to lag decision-making for a while, so visible market share lags actual inertia by some amount.
Finally, keep in mind that even upgrading from one version of Excel to another can break compatibility. The office world has very strong backwards-compatibility requirements. Gnumeric may not fill those requirements, but we also know that Excel doesn't do so.
The whole point of incorporation is to avoid personal legal liability (and thus let employees break the law as much as possible with as few disincentives as possible).
So, will SCO be making an educational discount available?
And two potential blunders in the license I'm curious about:
First it does seem that while SCO has the "does not grant a right to recieve any distribution of software from SCO or any other third party", and I'm not a lawyer, it seems that they are revoking their rights (for $699) to sue you for possessing a pirated copy of their software.
Second, SCO IP is defined as IP in binary code licensed by SCO under its standard commercial license. Does Caldera/SCO cross-license IP with anyone? If so, is there any situation where Caldera/SCO would be the reponsible party if you use such IP? They've given up their own right to go after you in such a case, as far as I can tell. Is there any chance that they've given out more rights than they want to? I'd love to find a terrible loophole in their license.
MUDs are a dying genre. They are swiftly being replaced MMPORGS.
Perhaps in market share, but the player base seems to be roughly constant (though I really wouldn't notice anything short of an order-of-magnitude shift in some direction).
The whole text-based game industry is being replaced, or has been replaced, by games with visuals because there is no good reason to restrict gameplay to text-only when you can spruce it up with immersive graphical environments.
Perhaps in theory, but there are a number of good reasons I can think of. The big one, the fact that the client interface is simple, is a huge deal. It means:
* MUD clients have a simple protocol -- the same text that you're looking at on-screen. It's *very* easy for players to customize clients to fit a given MUD's protocol (via triggers or regexes on prompts). There is no standard GUI MUD client. Such a thing is not impossible (and ever since VRML fell on it's face I've been wondering who's going to try next). I guess it'd be something like Neal Stephenson's Metaverse. Worldforge is one effort, but it seems far too ambitious to ever usefully come to fruition -- it's been six years in the making, and it's still not ready.
* Lightweight clients. Most games, even in this day and age, *still* suck down all the CPU time on a computer, and make no effort to avoid doing so. Some of this is because OSes provide crummy latency on sleep functions, some of it is because there's little reason to do so. If I'm compiling XFree86 in the background, I can play a MUD in the background without worrying about the CPU usage. Not true of Neverwinter Nights or Jagged Alliance 2 or really any other game on my computer that I can think of. Most games don't do this.
* Very powerful, mature clients. There are excellent MUD clients out there. They have triggers, aliases, macros, etc. It's much harder and less obvious how to do this with a GUI environment. This is the same problem that GUI and TUI apps face -- the reason all the "real" programs that a UNIX guru uses are text-based is because the text-based programs have a very powerful, simple way to tie the two together. After more than two decades of GUIs, we *still* do not have good, universal GUI scripting and user-controllable IPC mechanisms on the degree of the simple pipe that the TUI provides.
* Unobtrusiveness. It's easy to snap a MUD window into the background for a moment while chatting on ICQ or web browsing or something similar. Most 3d MMORPGs have, in the name of "immersiveness", made it standard to take over the entire display.
* Easier creation. If you took a look at all the MUDs, rooms, worlds, and mobs out there, you'd be amazed at the sheer amount of content. It's easy for anyone that can write and has a bit of imagination to sit down and make a MUD world. It's much harder to be a good skinner and modeler. I can write a description of a green-haired female elf wearing a green silk gown and with a burnished bronze waistband that glows red. I can certainly not skin and model one, not without expending many, many times as much time and effort. Hence, there is just *more content* out there for MUDs.
* Better handling of text. There is a lot of text in MUDs, and a fair amount in MMORPGs. I can read text in my scrollback-buffer-ized MUD client much more easily than I can with little bits of text floating in the air over character's heads.
* Spatial distance is a function of gameplay-related meaningfulness. In an MMORPG, I may walk for a minute to cover some random, boring green hill. In a MUD (or an TUI IF game), I may walk ten feet each step if I'm in a detailed city full of things to do, and cover ten miles if I'm in the countryside. The boring and the mundane are naturally filtered out.
* Natural logging. It's easy to keep a complete log (not just of messages) in a MUD. It's much harder to do so with a MMORPG.
* MUDs do a better job of completely taking advantage of their medium
The ASP (Application Service Provider, not Active Server Page) problem with respect to the GPL has been discussed many times. I don't believe it's ever been resolved -- I suspect that eventually, someone will abuse it far enough and people will get peeved and Stallman will come up with something clever for GPLv3.
The content database also clearly belongs to the mud. This includes textual descriptions, vital statistics and special behaviors of all the objects, NPCs, rooms, custom quests and scripts.
That's actually one point that I find kind of sad.
Yes, in an ideal world, every MUD would be unique. However, there's also something to be said for having a generic "elf" (or even "Tolkien elf") that people keep improving and working on, and can be used to accelerate building in new MUDs.
I've seen a number of MUDs go belly-up, and inevitably, all that content that the MUD admins guarded carefully to keep anyone from stealing it gets lost, gone forever. Had the content been around, a player could have carried on the torch, and the MUD would not have died. I still miss the wild ChibaMOO that I once wandered around in for a few weeks, and I wish that there was some way that I could do so again -- but all that content is long gone.
Obviously, folks should be able to do what they want to do with content. If they don't want to share it, that's their perogative. However, it is kind of sad how few people choose to share their mobs/items/rooms for, say, a Circle-based MUD.
If you still think that shared content wouldn't benefit anyone, consider what the existence of public libraries has done for the interactive fiction community.
Some other MUD-related thoughts:
* Most MUDs are very, very, very simplistic compared to interactive fiction, and follow roughly diku-like commands. The parser and the degree of description and object interaction in an IF game is far, far greater than that of a MUD. I think that the ability to get a nice set of generic objects (come on, there are nice tweaks that you can make, but a game that includes a Louisville Slugger has an item that's pretty much a Lousiville Slugger).
* MUD codebases started out a long time ago. You called them "hackish". I think I'd call them "not as amenable to modular features as they could be". Furthermore, most code is old-style C. MUDs are, IMHO, a good place to use higher level languages than C -- they do not have high CPU requirements, and do undergo frequent development. I do wish that there was a better alternative than Java, as Java is (again, IMHO) too RAM-hungry for effective MUD use.
* The fighting system in most MUDs is still quite simplistic. This is the area of greatest improvement of most MUDs (since it was the most lacking part of the original diku system, and most derivatives with improvements have not shared their changes). Unfortunately, most coders do not share changes, so there *is* no common set of, say, martial-arts related features.
* Color. ANSI was not an original diku feature, and because of that, color customizability is patchy among many MUDs.
* Non-combative solutions to problems. MUDs have traditionally focused on long, not uncommonly boring hack-and-slash. Good IF games or Dungeons and Dragons games generally have a number of non-combat solutions to problems. Fallout or Neverwinter Nights frequently have non-combat solutions (or at least multiple solutions to problems). Diku didn't do it, so nobody does it.
* MUD security is still poor. Almost all MUDs are still accessed via telnet, including a plain-text password. Why not SSH (particularly given the compression features in it, which would help modem players everywhere)? Sure, it's not as bad as exposing a shell account, but it's not great. Again, none of the standard open source codebases support SSH, so no MUDs do.
I'd be curious as to whether there are any MUDs that expose their entire codebase and roomset via CVS (well, given today's articles, maybe SVN:-) ). I really think that there are a lot of features that folks would make good use of if made available.
Finally, I think that a lack of open-source and open-content MUDs leads to a good deal of fragmentation. There are many half-done MUD frameworks out there, instead of one or two actively developed and featureful MUDs.
I'd say that this is more of a flaw in the UNIX permissions scheme, that normal UNIX boxes don't support ACLs (or let non-root accounts create limited user accounts, which would provide some similar functionality).
Slashdot Mirror
Much as I'd love to see a Gov't move to OSS, I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be another bait'n'switch to get Microsoft to give 'em some discounts
Keep in mind that even discounts help Linux by hurting Microsoft.
I know for a fact that the company I work has over the years written a large number of pieces of software for the ATO using, vb and .net. Now simply the cost of moving over these third party software pieces would make any more away from microsoft extremely difficult.
I still can't figure out why customers don't try to factor in cost of lock-in. The only reason I can think of is that perhaps PHBs don't look at anything but information from software vendors, and software vendors are unlikely to include lock-in cost estimates.
I'm also thrilled to see the Brazilian government taking steps toward independence from Redmond (and, indirectly, the US Government-- everyone down here remembers the "NSA Key" very clearly) by moving toward F/OSS.
How do you feel about the NSA-developed SELinux extensions that are being added to distros all over the place?
here are many who prefer the Green's stand but fear that a vote for Green is a vote wasted and would only serve to help put the Republicans in office.
Of course, that *is* what happened in Florida, so it's not that unreasonable of a concern.
No, but if they had been running redundant systems elsewhere with no illegitimate services (if such services did exist), they would have had a legal solution that would have both fulfilled the ToS and the FBI's wants.
Why would FBI agents even be in Sweden? FBI jurisdiction extends only to domestic issues. Foreign issues are for the CIA to deal with.
Of course, the current end-run around those restrictions is the creation of the Office of Homeland Security, which has the powers of the FBI *and* CIA (and some of the INS) and none of the restrictions.
The problem is the ratio of times that terrorists are *really* involved.
How many major terror acts are perpetrated or confounded each year relative to how much we've seen "The War on Terror" used to justify anything and everything anyone can get away with. Funding for every agency under the sun derives from whether they're combatting terror. The DOE needs money "to combat terror" by developing methods to protect our utility grid. The DoD needs funds to "help combat terrorism" by developing new monitoring and data-mining technologies. The CDC needs money to "help combat terror" by producing vaccines. I'll bet that even the Department of Agriculture has funding initiatives based on "terror" somewhere -- maybe they want to monitor use of crop dusters, who knows.
It's freaking ridiculous. The "War on Terror" certainly saves lives, but the amount of resources that have been claimed in its name *vastly* outweigh the amount of damage that terrorism has done to us. A lot more people lost their lives to car crashes in 2001 than to terrorist attacks. Did we have black helicopters ready to swoop down on speeders? How about long-range alcohol sensors? What about armed guards at strategically-placed toll booths that search cars and people thoroughly for any kind of alcohol? All these sorts of things have been done in the name of "The War on Terror", instead of being used in an area where more American lives are being lost. The "War on Terror" is, frankly, a tool based in fear to help manipulate the masses. It has little practical value.
I claim that terrorism on the order of at 200:1 life amplification (roughly what the 9/11 terrorists achived -- something like 4000 lives to around 20 terrorists) cannot be eliminated without massively curtailing and altering a free society. There are just too many ways for a person willing to die to kill many people.
I would like to point out that people are only willing to throw their lives away if they are incredibly upset over something you've done. You don't see Iceland coming under terror attacks, because Iceland doesn't anger people to the point of being willing to die to kill Icelanders (or whatever a citizen of Iceland is called).
We have spent masses of money and effort on trying to figure out how to crush terror rings, on making people so afraid to resist the United States that they won't dream of it. The problem is, it can't be done. The Soviets couldn't crush resistance with years of secret police and encouraging children to inform on their parents. I don't think Bush Junior can do so in our society. Sheer force and fear just don't work when you're dealing with people who are willing to lose their lives to kill. You have no cards that they are interested in.
How much money has been spent on diplomatic and social solutions to eliminating terrorism? Supposedly the United States has a negative image in Islamic countries -- how much work have we gone through to improve that image? How much effort has gone into determining the things that are making people so angry that they are willing to *die* to hurt citizens in the US and resolve those issues?
A lot of people feel that trying to resolve things peacefully would be "giving in to the terrorists", and encourage future terrorist acts. I don't agree. The only value to a hard-core refusal to ever attempt peaceful solutions is as an attempt to establish prescedent governing future acts -- that no terrorist would ever be willing to attack the United States if it was *guaranteed* that doing so would hurt his cause, and damn the consequences to us in hurting that cause. The problem is, the prescedent has clearly not been established during the time we have taken a hard-line approach. The United States was attacked several times, despite having followed tough guidelines for dealing with terrorism in the past.
I'm curious as to what would happen if the 70 billion or whatever dollars that are being spent to keep us in Iraq (which at least originally was supposed
You might be able to eliminate blurring with a lens aparatus to increase light gather and a strobe (perhaps an IR strobe for working in normal conditions without driving people bananas -- not sure whether we have IR sources that can strobe yet).
Another possibility -- if you *know* that you're going to be using the camera for video capture, and cost isn't an issue, you can put high-quality accelerometers and other angle and position-locating devices into the thing.
They could already do this.
There is software to achieve much of this. You'd just need to stream video elsewhere.
Frankly, I think it's reasonable to require all personnel in secure areas to leave their cell phones at a holding area, and provide them with special secure internal-use-only phone-type devices while they are within the facility. Cell phones have an increasing range of security issues.
Thanks for the good post.
I notice that Mann's work appears to deal with flat scenes-mobile camera, or stationary camera-arbitrary scene.
Do you know what state-of-the-art in 3d model building is? Is there effective work on arbitrary camera, arbitrary scene?
I know that CMU has a bunch of work that can pull off some of this, but I think that it may be special-cased (i.e. determining the location of the camera using other methods) and may have sensors other than vision (like laser range finders and the like) involved.
On the other hand, I don't think that the story submitter had the right to get the link to the story accepted. Dammit, Slashdot editors *normally* don't allow links to stories that require jumping through hoops to read, but they grandfather news sources in. At one point, the NYT didn't require registration, so they got in. At one point, Salon wasn't a pain in the ass to read, and so it got in.
I'd like to see Salon and the NYT removed from the "special pass" list.
And yet, how often does said geek receive money, food, sex, or return expertise for (sometimes) hours of work and expertise?
I'll bet doctors get a lot of the same. "Say, Fred, my arm's been hurting and I figured that while you were here..."
I could happily live with no tech support -- there are a few ISPs that do this. You can cancel or order an account, and that's all they purport to do. They give you a slip of paper with the information you need, and if you have trouble configuring your email client, well, that's your problem. Of course, it means that you don't have to pay for the tech support that you never use anyway.
Okay, "frequently" may be overkill. :-) I was trying to drive home the point that it's not unreasonable.
Say you want to do up a spreadsheet containing some tables that contain data based on random data. You *could* either include fifteen megs or whatever of random numbers, or you could just include a random number function with a seed if your spreadsheet uses a standard RNG. As long as the variability with different seeds isn't significant for your work, you shouldn't have a problem. However, you *may* have insignificant digits shifting around in your table, which doesn't look all that professional (a bunch of different people with slightly different tables).
The other major use for pseudo-random numbers with a known seed that I can think of off-the-cuff is in finding problems between two environments. Say Bob has a copy of Excel 98 and you have a copy of Excel 2003, and for some reason Bob is getting different numbers than you are. Possibly you're relying on something that you shouldn't (i.e. Bob has an old version of some other file that this one uses), or perhaps Microsoft broke something between versions. If you can fix the seeds, you can find where the divergence is creeping in. If you can't fix the seed, then you have no way of finding and fixing what's wrong.
Sorry, that should be "ACLS still are not standard in the UNIX world".
Fedora Core 1 still, I think, does not use ACLs (by default). Most software doesn't understand ACLs. I've heard a lot of disparaging comments made on LKML about POSIX ACL design -- not sure how accurate it is, but it's there.
If I'm writing something, I can't just use ACLs and assume that they'll be there for the BSD, the Linux, the Solaris, the OS X users of my software.
Yup, but ACLs still are standard in the UNIX world. You can chmod with confidence, but not be sure that you can use a POSIX ACL.
/dev/urandom is not /dev/random. When the entropy pool is exhausted (which will happen extremely quickly if producing a large set of random numbers for statistical work), instead of blocking it will use a hash algorithm. /dev/urandom varies unpredictably between being unpredictable and being very unpredictable.
:-)
On the other hand, when doing a study, frequently you *do* want to be able to use the same seed to produce exactly the same results. This is a legitimate failing in gnumeric. Not all random numbers are created equal.
For what it's worth, I did (simple) analysis of a large set of random number generators for a high school science fair project. The Microsoft RNG (which has been used ever since at least early QBASIC days) is pretty decent, at least from a uniformity standpoint.
Keep in mind that inertia works both ways. Yes, there's a lot of folks that don't want to move. However, it's equally difficult (possibly worse) for Microsoft to regain any customers that do move. Also, actual movement tends to lag decision-making for a while, so visible market share lags actual inertia by some amount.
Finally, keep in mind that even upgrading from one version of Excel to another can break compatibility. The office world has very strong backwards-compatibility requirements. Gnumeric may not fill those requirements, but we also know that Excel doesn't do so.
The whole point of incorporation is to avoid personal legal liability (and thus let employees break the law as much as possible with as few disincentives as possible).
So, will SCO be making an educational discount available?
And two potential blunders in the license I'm curious about:
First it does seem that while SCO has the "does not grant a right to recieve any distribution of software from SCO or any other third party", and I'm not a lawyer, it seems that they are revoking their rights (for $699) to sue you for possessing a pirated copy of their software.
Second, SCO IP is defined as IP in binary code licensed by SCO under its standard commercial license. Does Caldera/SCO cross-license IP with anyone? If so, is there any situation where Caldera/SCO would be the reponsible party if you use such IP? They've given up their own right to go after you in such a case, as far as I can tell. Is there any chance that they've given out more rights than they want to? I'd love to find a terrible loophole in their license.
Hey, I just realized that if BSD is tainted, then so is Mac OS X.
Wow. If it didn't already seem to be obvious, I'd say that this may be an issue that all the OS evangelists can get together along on -- SCO sucking.
MUDs are a dying genre. They are swiftly being replaced MMPORGS.
Perhaps in market share, but the player base seems to be roughly constant (though I really wouldn't notice anything short of an order-of-magnitude shift in some direction).
The whole text-based game industry is being replaced, or has been replaced, by games with visuals because there is no good reason to restrict gameplay to text-only when you can spruce it up with immersive graphical environments.
Perhaps in theory, but there are a number of good reasons I can think of. The big one, the fact that the client interface is simple, is a huge deal. It means:
* MUD clients have a simple protocol -- the same text that you're looking at on-screen. It's *very* easy for players to customize clients to fit a given MUD's protocol (via triggers or regexes on prompts). There is no standard GUI MUD client. Such a thing is not impossible (and ever since VRML fell on it's face I've been wondering who's going to try next). I guess it'd be something like Neal Stephenson's Metaverse. Worldforge is one effort, but it seems far too ambitious to ever usefully come to fruition -- it's been six years in the making, and it's still not ready.
* Lightweight clients. Most games, even in this day and age, *still* suck down all the CPU time on a computer, and make no effort to avoid doing so. Some of this is because OSes provide crummy latency on sleep functions, some of it is because there's little reason to do so. If I'm compiling XFree86 in the background, I can play a MUD in the background without worrying about the CPU usage. Not true of Neverwinter Nights or Jagged Alliance 2 or really any other game on my computer that I can think of. Most games don't do this.
* Very powerful, mature clients. There are excellent MUD clients out there. They have triggers, aliases, macros, etc. It's much harder and less obvious how to do this with a GUI environment. This is the same problem that GUI and TUI apps face -- the reason all the "real" programs that a UNIX guru uses are text-based is because the text-based programs have a very powerful, simple way to tie the two together. After more than two decades of GUIs, we *still* do not have good, universal GUI scripting and user-controllable IPC mechanisms on the degree of the simple pipe that the TUI provides.
* Unobtrusiveness. It's easy to snap a MUD window into the background for a moment while chatting on ICQ or web browsing or something similar. Most 3d MMORPGs have, in the name of "immersiveness", made it standard to take over the entire display.
* Easier creation. If you took a look at all the MUDs, rooms, worlds, and mobs out there, you'd be amazed at the sheer amount of content. It's easy for anyone that can write and has a bit of imagination to sit down and make a MUD world. It's much harder to be a good skinner and modeler. I can write a description of a green-haired female elf wearing a green silk gown and with a burnished bronze waistband that glows red. I can certainly not skin and model one, not without expending many, many times as much time and effort. Hence, there is just *more content* out there for MUDs.
* Better handling of text. There is a lot of text in MUDs, and a fair amount in MMORPGs. I can read text in my scrollback-buffer-ized MUD client much more easily than I can with little bits of text floating in the air over character's heads.
* Spatial distance is a function of gameplay-related meaningfulness. In an MMORPG, I may walk for a minute to cover some random, boring green hill. In a MUD (or an TUI IF game), I may walk ten feet each step if I'm in a detailed city full of things to do, and cover ten miles if I'm in the countryside. The boring and the mundane are naturally filtered out.
* Natural logging. It's easy to keep a complete log (not just of messages) in a MUD. It's much harder to do so with a MMORPG.
* MUDs do a better job of completely taking advantage of their medium
The ASP (Application Service Provider, not Active Server Page) problem with respect to the GPL has been discussed many times. I don't believe it's ever been resolved -- I suspect that eventually, someone will abuse it far enough and people will get peeved and Stallman will come up with something clever for GPLv3.
The content database also clearly belongs to the mud. This includes textual descriptions, vital statistics and special behaviors of all the objects, NPCs, rooms, custom quests and scripts.
:-) ). I really think that there are a lot of features that folks would make good use of if made available.
That's actually one point that I find kind of sad.
Yes, in an ideal world, every MUD would be unique. However, there's also something to be said for having a generic "elf" (or even "Tolkien elf") that people keep improving and working on, and can be used to accelerate building in new MUDs.
I've seen a number of MUDs go belly-up, and inevitably, all that content that the MUD admins guarded carefully to keep anyone from stealing it gets lost, gone forever. Had the content been around, a player could have carried on the torch, and the MUD would not have died. I still miss the wild ChibaMOO that I once wandered around in for a few weeks, and I wish that there was some way that I could do so again -- but all that content is long gone.
Obviously, folks should be able to do what they want to do with content. If they don't want to share it, that's their perogative. However, it is kind of sad how few people choose to share their mobs/items/rooms for, say, a Circle-based MUD.
If you still think that shared content wouldn't benefit anyone, consider what the existence of public libraries has done for the interactive fiction community.
Some other MUD-related thoughts:
* Most MUDs are very, very, very simplistic compared to interactive fiction, and follow roughly diku-like commands. The parser and the degree of description and object interaction in an IF game is far, far greater than that of a MUD. I think that the ability to get a nice set of generic objects (come on, there are nice tweaks that you can make, but a game that includes a Louisville Slugger has an item that's pretty much a Lousiville Slugger).
* MUD codebases started out a long time ago. You called them "hackish". I think I'd call them "not as amenable to modular features as they could be". Furthermore, most code is old-style C. MUDs are, IMHO, a good place to use higher level languages than C -- they do not have high CPU requirements, and do undergo frequent development. I do wish that there was a better alternative than Java, as Java is (again, IMHO) too RAM-hungry for effective MUD use.
* The fighting system in most MUDs is still quite simplistic. This is the area of greatest improvement of most MUDs (since it was the most lacking part of the original diku system, and most derivatives with improvements have not shared their changes). Unfortunately, most coders do not share changes, so there *is* no common set of, say, martial-arts related features.
* Color. ANSI was not an original diku feature, and because of that, color customizability is patchy among many MUDs.
* Non-combative solutions to problems. MUDs have traditionally focused on long, not uncommonly boring hack-and-slash. Good IF games or Dungeons and Dragons games generally have a number of non-combat solutions to problems. Fallout or Neverwinter Nights frequently have non-combat solutions (or at least multiple solutions to problems). Diku didn't do it, so nobody does it.
* MUD security is still poor. Almost all MUDs are still accessed via telnet, including a plain-text password. Why not SSH (particularly given the compression features in it, which would help modem players everywhere)? Sure, it's not as bad as exposing a shell account, but it's not great. Again, none of the standard open source codebases support SSH, so no MUDs do.
I'd be curious as to whether there are any MUDs that expose their entire codebase and roomset via CVS (well, given today's articles, maybe SVN
Finally, I think that a lack of open-source and open-content MUDs leads to a good deal of fragmentation. There are many half-done MUD frameworks out there, instead of one or two actively developed and featureful MUDs.
I'd say that this is more of a flaw in the UNIX permissions scheme, that normal UNIX boxes don't support ACLs (or let non-root accounts create limited user accounts, which would provide some similar functionality).