And that goes for any games. I mean, Christ. Suppose you're playing Yoshi's Cookie. I mean, God forbid the instructions say that "Yoshi should eat cookies", because some idiot might, at least in a totally distorted reality, manage to interpret this as a mandate to eat cookies without stop in real life. Furthermore, this is clearly targetting the defenseless bulimia sufferers of the world.
Sigh.
You know, I really don't have feelings about most minority groups one way or the other. Except when crap like this comes out. The game didn't make me dislike Haitians as a general group nearly as much as said Haitians are doing.
Hate (alone) is not illegal. In fact, criticism of people based on race or whatnot is quite legal, First Amendment-protected speech (as long as you don't violate slander/libel laws, of course).
Hate crimes refer to a specific class of crimes that are always illegal, but have punishments elevated by being classified as a hate crime.
If you kill someone, you might be looking at, say, a second-degree murder charge. However, if it is found that you killed the other person because you hated the color of his skin and killed him *for that reason*, then you may be charged with a hate crime, and may undergo nastier penalties.
The rationale, as far as I know, was to prevent racial violence against blacks in the South by jacking up punishments against their attackers. Now, I suspect that a lot of this is emotional and not particularly well-founded, but there is some argument. The idea is that you don't want to make penalties worse than necessary to discourage people from committing the crime. If you have a group of people that have a much higher punishment threshhold before they will stop committing a crime (the KKK, for instance), it might be nice to punish them and them alone more harshly.
I'm not saying that I agree or disagree with this approach (I tend to think that at the least, hate crime laws are quite out-of-date and produce nasty social artifacts), but it isn't quite as scary as attempting to outlaw your thoughts or verbal/written expression.
There are many cases of military aircraft having to land, and being helped by thier hosts.
They are. They went out of their way to provide the necessary resources to avoid loss of human life. On the other hand, his "fly over Antarctica" project is not something that they need to assist him with by draining their *own* contingency fuel supplies.
Heck, even if it's just to discourage people from pulling stupid stunts, I sympathize with the scientists. Imagine that you're a scientist working at the most remote research station in the world, on a continent given over entirely to scientific research.
All of a sudden, a *stupid* Australian drops his plane into your research post and wants you to fuel him up and check the oil. He didn't have clearance to pull this stunt, despite the fact that it would have been more than easy to ask. If he really needed extra fuel, he could just have asked them, paid for it, and had it shipped ahead of time. Everyone *else* in Antarctica, including the scientists, is required to plan ahead for safety. All the scientists there have $N$ quantity of food and resources, have only $N$ days allocated to them to do their research (not easy to get grants to fund Antarctic research), and instead are dealing with some thrillseeker.
Frankly, I think that his plane should be confiscated and used by whatever SAR people are responsible for near-Antarctic rescues.
This Aussie reminds me of the idiot girl in "The Cold Equations". He's damned lucky that nothing worse happened to him.
SCO claim e-mail and other services were compromised which do not use the TCP SYN/ACK and are not therefore vulnerable to this attack
"email"? SMTP? POP3? IMAP? All of these are TCP-based, and are therefore vulnerable to SYN flooding.
My guess is a little less conspiracy theory oriented. Some IT guy at SCO royally screwed up and took down an important server. He tried to fix it, but got yelled at by management before he could resolve things. He made up an "oh, hackers did that" story to cover his ass.
Just because it makes the open source community look bad and they thought that they *were* under attack, SCO execs handed out a press release.
Mutt comes close, but doesn't have the ability to "opportunistically encrypt" messages -- i.e. encrypt the message if a key for the destination email address can be found, otherwise not.
Using this would help encourage people to use email encryption.
If Sauer ignores the TCNO, he is either stupid, or a Microsoft shill.
Neither.
His paper probably would have been ignored, except for the fact that Slashdot posted it.
Every day in every field where it's hard to conclusively show that someone's theories are wrong immediately (public policy, economics, etc), there are a lot of papers produced arguing new points that are a bit dubious. If someone can get attention from putting out a new idea, they can move up the academic/corporate ladder.
You shouldn't be pissed off at this professor. Instead, you should be happy that open source is such a facinating new area of economics that professors are now publishing lots of papers on it to try to explain it an analyze it. Will there be ones that explore what people consider to be the negative sides of open source? Sure.
The difference between a sword and a gun is incredible, which makes quotes dealing with swords-and-violence not exactly comparable to the modern situation of guns-and-violence. Heck, our founding fathers couldn't even fathom the high-powered, super-accurate, full-automatic weapons of today.
First of all, I will grant that our founding fathers are not infallible. Just because they felt that something was a good idea doesn't mean that it actually is. They do deserve some respect, though, because their system has worked pretty well so far.
It doesn't matter how high-powered a weapon is. If you can shoot someone, you can kill them. They still had *pistol duels* at the time. Getting shot with an 1700s pistol or a modern Glock can both produce a fatal result. As for killing lots of people -- you could make a bomb with gunpowder and kill a lot of people at once then or now.
There have been very few cases of people going nuts and mowing down people with full clips in assault rifles. Even if that was the case, the point of allowing gun ownership is in keeping a great equalizer. Tyrants can be *shot*. That was the concern. Surely you agree that maintaining guns of equal strength in the police and citizenry is important?
Violence is cowardice. Cowardice is beating up people who are merely disagreeing. Cowardice is pulling a gun on someone because you disagree.
No. You may find cowardice distasteful, and the violence used in this story also distasteful. That does not let you equate cowardice and violence, however. The two are definitely different.
An action is considered an example cowardice when someone weights risk of loss involved the an action overly highly relative to potential gain, and acts based on that judgement.
An action is violent when it causes injury to another.
When a racoon comes near a bird's eggs, birds will frequently try to drive off the racoon, even though they are smaller and at physical risk. They are attempting to do violence to the racoon. They are not, however, cowards in any kind of the traditional sense -- they are risking their lives to protect their eggs.
I disagree that cowardice is beating up people who are merely disagreeing. To do so may be aggressive, but certainly not necessarily the act of a coward. I might attack a professional boxer with my bare hands because I disagree with him. Such an action might be quite stupid, but not that of a coward.
No. We've sent them to Iraq under the pretense of self-defense (notice how Bush and Rumsfield said, MANY TIMES, they knew exactly where the WMDs were, but wouldn't tell the UN and can't find any trace of them now?), where they're claiming to kill 54 insurgents when the locals say they kill 8 citizens.
The Bush/Rumsfield BS has nothing to do with what the typical grunt is doing.
Furthermore, the point the guy is making is that said soldiers are in an environment where people that are indistinguishable from civilians are attacking them. Sometimes they make wrong judgement calls, but they are still making decisions in the desired situation -- in combat.
If there was a problem, you'd have Marines combing down the streets with submachineguns in Springfield, Illinois whenever they got peeved.
People practice basketball for years to develop skills and be able to react without thinking. Musicians practice for years to learn how to use their instruments without having to think about what they do. In both cases, people are training their neurons by repeated action. And somehow we don't think practicing using a gun day after day doesn't do the same thing? Get real. Violence leads to more violence, even if it starts with fantasy violence.
I don't buy it. By your argument:
* Playing football regularly would teach people to slam people into the ground when they get angry with them. I don't see many marketing managers running out and doing so, despite the fact that football is wildly popular with the American male.
* SimCity should be banned because it promotes a callousness about evicting people from their houses.
* Martial arts, generally considered a healthy activity and good for discipline and dedication, should *definitely* be banned. Martial arts does *nothing* but try to teach you to respond to violence on reflex alone.
* Oregon Trail (old video game in which you play a pioneer traveling to Oregon) should be banned -- you shoot as a major portion of the game.
I understand why your argument is alluring, but there are an awful lot of holes in trying to apply it to real life.
Why is it the good companies go under, but the crap ones live on?
My guess is that this is not the case (in particular). Game development houses tend to have awfully short lifetimes. They're often small. If developer Jones and Smith decide to move on to bigger and better things, there may not be much company left worth continuing with.
My guess is that you just notice when the good ones go out of business.
Try this. Dig out a bunch of old DOS games and try to locate the development houses that produced them. Some are still around -- id is still happily making games, for instance. A lot of them, however, are long, long gone.
Of course, I also found this thing called IanOut, a third-party Fallout engine...
I'm dubious that it would be of much value.
The Fallout engine is actually of fairly little technical significance (well, I haven't worked on the code, but I don't see anything particularly outstanding or unheard of in it). In many ways, it's actually rather behind the times. This isn't trying to bash the authors -- it gets the job done that it was intended to do -- but just to say that it isn't quite the same as, say, the most recent Carmack engine, where the code is really beyond what other folks have been doing. The amazing thing about Fallout is the content. The artwork, design, story, dialog, free form play and neat character creation system are all top-notch, and are what make Fallout fun to play.
So, unless you simply want to play existing Fallout titles, I'm not sure that the engine does much good. The problem is that it's really *hard* to make all the levels and characters and graphics and dialog and audio associated with a Fallout game.
IBM is not a charity. IBM is not altruistic. They're not going to fight the GPL battle, or any other battle, unless they feel it's necessary.
Not only that, there just isn't any point. SCO made it pretty clear in their SEC filing that they were betting the company on the ability to get Linux licensing fees, and that their old business was no longer profitable.
If they lose this case or get dismissed, they lose any chance of getting Linux fees. They have no income, and not a hell of a lot of commercially useful assets. That'll probably be it for SCO. McBride will cobble together what kind of golden parachute he can and get out.
Unless they can come up with some kind of new delay tactics (or really do have some astounding evidence that they've incredibly refused to release all along), they've pretty much had it.
That didn't work because Microsoft controlled the market.
SCO is a guttering, dying candle.
On the other hand, there really isn't much point in deliberately attacking them at this point other than catharsis. Nobody who knows what they're talking about (and knows what the GNU POSIX toolset is) would use Unixware.
the average desktop user never uses more than about 300Mhz of processing speed.
No, the average desktop user uses *all* their cycles when they need them. The average desktop user doesn't sustain anywhere near 3% CPU usage. Having a fast processor will improve latency on CPU-bound tasks. There are very few cases for typical desktop use where the CPU is running full bore for an extended period of time -- games are just about the only thing (and with a game, you want a fast processor).
I buy the fastest hard drive I can afford. I get one with the largest cache offered.
I disagree that this is a good idea. You have a computer that has *far* more memory for read-caching than the drive does, and more knowledge about what is going to be needed when. Unless you frequently use ancient operating systems, work with *huge* databases that you can't buy enough RAM to cache or have very unusual usage patterns where caching does no good (such as a backup server), you're much better off with more memory. Furthermore, faster drives are noisier, get hotter, and don't last as long. The only major theoretical advantage you can get from getting a fancier drive is a nicer scheduler than the host can offer, because the controller knows where the read head is.
I use motherboards with the fastest system bus offered.
I concur.
I buy as much memory as I can afford.
I agree that memory is the most important overlooked factor, but it's also easy to upgrade and gets cheaper over time.
Frankly, folks are likely to get better improvements (and save more) by poking at the software than the hardware.
At the very least, I remember comparing the K6-2 to the PII at the time. The PII had *much* better performance. It wasn't until after the K6-2 that AMD got competitive.
I started this series, and finished it out of sheer "I want to say that I've managed to get through the whole thing".
It does have some things that I like I think that Covenant (the main character) is a bit over-the-top when it comes to self-loathing, but despite that, it's interesting to see a series that focuses so much on despair. The magic is interesting -- a ring that can be phenomenally powerful, but only occasionally, and tends not to be there when one would like.
That being said, the read is also very tedious. I'd even call it the most tedious fantasy series I've ever read, and I tend to like fantasies that one reads slowly through (Paula Volsky is a hellofa writer). The books are quite similar to each other and start to blur together. At some point, you get tired of the sheer overload of "pure and clean" and "dark and twisted" and "appears clean, but is actually corrupted" imagery. At six books, each book having about a zillion pages and spending a huge portion of its time in this kind of imagery, it doesn't take a short attention span to start to wonder whether there's anything else.
Second, while the darkness of the series is nice for a change, I at least occasionally like to see good things happen. Real life at its worst just isn't anything like this. Covenant just loses, loses more, appears to gain and then the reader realizes that he actually lost. Just when you think things can't get worse, they do. All through the series.
Third, Covenant is a caricature. The reader cannot identify with him. I like my main characters to be understandable -- something where I have a vague idea why and how they operate. Covenant is just too much.
I agree with one respondent that you're too harsh on Covenant for the rape of the teenage girl. There were some awfully extenuating circumstances...and most of the rest of the series deals with Covenant's self-loathing for what he's done and what follows.
If Donaldson sped up his books -- a lot -- and varied his theme from purity/corruption over the *huge* number of pages in the series, I think that there might really be something there.
First, I have to admit that I had to look this up -- this is not from my head.:-)
However, the beta testing phase at a software company is generally defined as being a phase in the software life cycle during which the software is being tested to find any possible incompatibilities or user problems outside of the (small) initial development testing group. It is an phase that has one purpose -- to verify and test the software.
There is provision made in case law for experimental use, which does not start the one year patent application clock running.
Note that it is possible to call something a "beta" release, but still not have it be protected. The purpose of the release must be to test the software. I know a couple of packages that have been in "beta" for ages and are widely used. It's the purpose of the release, not the name that matters.
However, I'd say that Microsoft would have a pretty good case that their Chicago release was for experimental purposes.
I'd say it sounds like it came from a meeting with a bunch of PR people at which there was one bored lawyer who was required to submit a skeleton document to build the press release around. There are lots of legal tidbits, but no cohesive legal argument, and most of the material is just PR swipes at Red Hat, the FSF, IBM, etc.
This is serioulsy bold, and slanderous statement of this guy to make, and I'm wondering who's going to be the first to open a can of lawsuit ass on SCO.
By McBride's reckoning, the GPL deprives creators of their right to profit from their creations if they incorporate GPL'd code into their creation.
I'd be facinated to see how this differs from SCO's own far-more-draconian limitations on use of *their* IP....which they're in a court case with IBM about right now.
It really is quite insane. I mean, hat off to Darl for having the biggest pair of balls of all time, but despite his ambition, he's too incompetent to pull off his dreams. He's awful at PR and has made a bunch of claims that conflict with his lawyers. He tends to get steamed and lose control. He gambled his entire company (and the money of his investors) on an utterly unworkable system. His letters are downright incomprehensible and illogical.
GPL licensing isn't really giving up copyright protection. You've always been able to do that, just by placing something in the public domain. The GPL is just a fairly unusual license that deals with copyright.
It's kind of funny -- Darl claiming that he's fighting for copyright and justice and that the global economy depends on this case...and yet, the GPL works within the bounds of copyright, and most users of it are pretty happy, and the GPL's popularity has increased exponentially for years. SCO's own licensing schemes have crumbled in upon themselves, have on numberous times made bogus legal claims and tried to bend the law (such as refusing to disclose what code violated IBM's license to IBM after a judge ordered disclosure).
As for protecting technological advancement -- Darl, Linux is far more technologically advanced than SCO Unix. Furthermore, it's used in far more products, and facilitates research in a huge number of labs every day.
Darl's claims are so ludicrous that they start to enter the "so ridiculous that it's hard to get people to believe that he's really that far from the truth" zone.
If copyright didn't exist, the GPL could not exist -- everything would be public domain, and companies could release binary-only software.
I seriously doubt that RedHat has interest in blowing away copyright.
Most of this letter really is a straw man attack. It's not worth my time to punch holes in all of Darl's claims, but among other flaws:
(A) Darl claims that the GPL violates the Constitution and a number of other things. All "evidence", weak as it is, deals entirely with his claims about the motivations of several groups of people that happen to use the GPL. It has nothing to do with the GPL itself. This is a logical fallacy, on the order of saying "Bob owns a gun and Bob owns a big truck, so anyone owning a gun uses an excessive amount of gas".
(B) It's pretty clear that RH doesn't want to eliminate copyrights. Software patents are a significant disaster -- they are in a few company's corporate interests, but you will be very hard-pressed to find *any* engineer that supports them.
(C) McBride claimed that the GPL is invalid. Again. I'm wondering how he intends to argue that SCO didn't massively infringe copyrights of thousands of parties by then distributing Linux. Again. Same old, same old.
(D) McBride lies, and is happy to deliberately mislead people. We have seen this over and over and over in his claims and releases for almost a year now. It would be more of a surprise to find that he's being honest than that he's lying again.
Slashdot Mirror
And that goes for any games. I mean, Christ. Suppose you're playing Yoshi's Cookie. I mean, God forbid the instructions say that "Yoshi should eat cookies", because some idiot might, at least in a totally distorted reality, manage to interpret this as a mandate to eat cookies without stop in real life. Furthermore, this is clearly targetting the defenseless bulimia sufferers of the world.
Sigh.
You know, I really don't have feelings about most minority groups one way or the other. Except when crap like this comes out. The game didn't make me dislike Haitians as a general group nearly as much as said Haitians are doing.
Hate (alone) is not illegal. In fact, criticism of people based on race or whatnot is quite legal, First Amendment-protected speech (as long as you don't violate slander/libel laws, of course).
Hate crimes refer to a specific class of crimes that are always illegal, but have punishments elevated by being classified as a hate crime.
If you kill someone, you might be looking at, say, a second-degree murder charge. However, if it is found that you killed the other person because you hated the color of his skin and killed him *for that reason*, then you may be charged with a hate crime, and may undergo nastier penalties.
The rationale, as far as I know, was to prevent racial violence against blacks in the South by jacking up punishments against their attackers. Now, I suspect that a lot of this is emotional and not particularly well-founded, but there is some argument. The idea is that you don't want to make penalties worse than necessary to discourage people from committing the crime. If you have a group of people that have a much higher punishment threshhold before they will stop committing a crime (the KKK, for instance), it might be nice to punish them and them alone more harshly.
I'm not saying that I agree or disagree with this approach (I tend to think that at the least, hate crime laws are quite out-of-date and produce nasty social artifacts), but it isn't quite as scary as attempting to outlaw your thoughts or verbal/written expression.
There are many cases of military aircraft having to land, and being helped by thier hosts.
They are. They went out of their way to provide the necessary resources to avoid loss of human life. On the other hand, his "fly over Antarctica" project is not something that they need to assist him with by draining their *own* contingency fuel supplies.
Heck, even if it's just to discourage people from pulling stupid stunts, I sympathize with the scientists. Imagine that you're a scientist working at the most remote research station in the world, on a continent given over entirely to scientific research.
All of a sudden, a *stupid* Australian drops his plane into your research post and wants you to fuel him up and check the oil. He didn't have clearance to pull this stunt, despite the fact that it would have been more than easy to ask. If he really needed extra fuel, he could just have asked them, paid for it, and had it shipped ahead of time. Everyone *else* in Antarctica, including the scientists, is required to plan ahead for safety. All the scientists there have $N$ quantity of food and resources, have only $N$ days allocated to them to do their research (not easy to get grants to fund Antarctic research), and instead are dealing with some thrillseeker.
Frankly, I think that his plane should be confiscated and used by whatever SAR people are responsible for near-Antarctic rescues.
This Aussie reminds me of the idiot girl in "The Cold Equations". He's damned lucky that nothing worse happened to him.
SCO claim e-mail and other services were compromised which do not use the TCP SYN/ACK and are not therefore vulnerable to this attack
"email"? SMTP? POP3? IMAP? All of these are TCP-based, and are therefore vulnerable to SYN flooding.
My guess is a little less conspiracy theory oriented. Some IT guy at SCO royally screwed up and took down an important server. He tried to fix it, but got yelled at by management before he could resolve things. He made up an "oh, hackers did that" story to cover his ass.
Just because it makes the open source community look bad and they thought that they *were* under attack, SCO execs handed out a press release.
Both are publishers, not just dev houses.
I've yet to see any client do PGP right.
Mutt comes close, but doesn't have the ability to "opportunistically encrypt" messages -- i.e. encrypt the message if a key for the destination email address can be found, otherwise not.
Using this would help encourage people to use email encryption.
If Sauer ignores the TCNO, he is either stupid, or a Microsoft shill.
Neither.
His paper probably would have been ignored, except for the fact that Slashdot posted it.
Every day in every field where it's hard to conclusively show that someone's theories are wrong immediately (public policy, economics, etc), there are a lot of papers produced arguing new points that are a bit dubious. If someone can get attention from putting out a new idea, they can move up the academic/corporate ladder.
You shouldn't be pissed off at this professor. Instead, you should be happy that open source is such a facinating new area of economics that professors are now publishing lots of papers on it to try to explain it an analyze it. Will there be ones that explore what people consider to be the negative sides of open source? Sure.
The difference between a sword and a gun is incredible, which makes quotes dealing with swords-and-violence not exactly comparable to the modern situation of guns-and-violence. Heck, our founding fathers couldn't even fathom the high-powered, super-accurate, full-automatic weapons of today.
First of all, I will grant that our founding fathers are not infallible. Just because they felt that something was a good idea doesn't mean that it actually is. They do deserve some respect, though, because their system has worked pretty well so far.
It doesn't matter how high-powered a weapon is. If you can shoot someone, you can kill them. They still had *pistol duels* at the time. Getting shot with an 1700s pistol or a modern Glock can both produce a fatal result. As for killing lots of people -- you could make a bomb with gunpowder and kill a lot of people at once then or now.
There have been very few cases of people going nuts and mowing down people with full clips in assault rifles. Even if that was the case, the point of allowing gun ownership is in keeping a great equalizer. Tyrants can be *shot*. That was the concern. Surely you agree that maintaining guns of equal strength in the police and citizenry is important?
Violence is cowardice. Cowardice is beating up people who are merely disagreeing. Cowardice is pulling a gun on someone because you disagree.
No. You may find cowardice distasteful, and the violence used in this story also distasteful. That does not let you equate cowardice and violence, however. The two are definitely different.
An action is considered an example cowardice when someone weights risk of loss involved the an action overly highly relative to potential gain, and acts based on that judgement.
An action is violent when it causes injury to another.
When a racoon comes near a bird's eggs, birds will frequently try to drive off the racoon, even though they are smaller and at physical risk. They are attempting to do violence to the racoon. They are not, however, cowards in any kind of the traditional sense -- they are risking their lives to protect their eggs.
I disagree that cowardice is beating up people who are merely disagreeing. To do so may be aggressive, but certainly not necessarily the act of a coward. I might attack a professional boxer with my bare hands because I disagree with him. Such an action might be quite stupid, but not that of a coward.
No. We've sent them to Iraq under the pretense of self-defense (notice how Bush and Rumsfield said, MANY TIMES, they knew exactly where the WMDs were, but wouldn't tell the UN and can't find any trace of them now?), where they're claiming to kill 54 insurgents when the locals say they kill 8 citizens.
The Bush/Rumsfield BS has nothing to do with what the typical grunt is doing.
Furthermore, the point the guy is making is that said soldiers are in an environment where people that are indistinguishable from civilians are attacking them. Sometimes they make wrong judgement calls, but they are still making decisions in the desired situation -- in combat.
If there was a problem, you'd have Marines combing down the streets with submachineguns in Springfield, Illinois whenever they got peeved.
People practice basketball for years to develop skills and be able to react without thinking. Musicians practice for years to learn how to use their instruments without having to think about what they do. In both cases, people are training their neurons by repeated action. And somehow we don't think practicing using a gun day after day doesn't do the same thing? Get real. Violence leads to more violence, even if it starts with fantasy violence.
I don't buy it. By your argument:
* Playing football regularly would teach people to slam people into the ground when they get angry with them. I don't see many marketing managers running out and doing so, despite the fact that football is wildly popular with the American male.
* SimCity should be banned because it promotes a callousness about evicting people from their houses.
* Martial arts, generally considered a healthy activity and good for discipline and dedication, should *definitely* be banned. Martial arts does *nothing* but try to teach you to respond to violence on reflex alone.
* Oregon Trail (old video game in which you play a pioneer traveling to Oregon) should be banned -- you shoot as a major portion of the game.
I understand why your argument is alluring, but there are an awful lot of holes in trying to apply it to real life.
Why is it the good companies go under, but the crap ones live on?
My guess is that this is not the case (in particular). Game development houses tend to have awfully short lifetimes. They're often small. If developer Jones and Smith decide to move on to bigger and better things, there may not be much company left worth continuing with.
My guess is that you just notice when the good ones go out of business.
Try this. Dig out a bunch of old DOS games and try to locate the development houses that produced them. Some are still around -- id is still happily making games, for instance. A lot of them, however, are long, long gone.
Of course, I also found this thing called IanOut, a third-party Fallout engine...
I'm dubious that it would be of much value.
The Fallout engine is actually of fairly little technical significance (well, I haven't worked on the code, but I don't see anything particularly outstanding or unheard of in it). In many ways, it's actually rather behind the times. This isn't trying to bash the authors -- it gets the job done that it was intended to do -- but just to say that it isn't quite the same as, say, the most recent Carmack engine, where the code is really beyond what other folks have been doing. The amazing thing about Fallout is the content. The artwork, design, story, dialog, free form play and neat character creation system are all top-notch, and are what make Fallout fun to play.
So, unless you simply want to play existing Fallout titles, I'm not sure that the engine does much good. The problem is that it's really *hard* to make all the levels and characters and graphics and dialog and audio associated with a Fallout game.
i.e., double jeopardy.
I was always of the vague opinion that double jeopardy only applied to criminal cases.
IBM is not a charity. IBM is not altruistic. They're not going to fight the GPL battle, or any other battle, unless they feel it's necessary.
Not only that, there just isn't any point. SCO made it pretty clear in their SEC filing that they were betting the company on the ability to get Linux licensing fees, and that their old business was no longer profitable.
If they lose this case or get dismissed, they lose any chance of getting Linux fees. They have no income, and not a hell of a lot of commercially useful assets. That'll probably be it for SCO. McBride will cobble together what kind of golden parachute he can and get out.
Unless they can come up with some kind of new delay tactics (or really do have some astounding evidence that they've incredibly refused to release all along), they've pretty much had it.
That didn't work because Microsoft controlled the market.
SCO is a guttering, dying candle.
On the other hand, there really isn't much point in deliberately attacking them at this point other than catharsis. Nobody who knows what they're talking about (and knows what the GNU POSIX toolset is) would use Unixware.
Ah, yes. System building debates.
the average desktop user never uses more than about 300Mhz of processing speed.
No, the average desktop user uses *all* their cycles when they need them. The average desktop user doesn't sustain anywhere near 3% CPU usage. Having a fast processor will improve latency on CPU-bound tasks. There are very few cases for typical desktop use where the CPU is running full bore for an extended period of time -- games are just about the only thing (and with a game, you want a fast processor).
I buy the fastest hard drive I can afford. I get one with the largest cache offered.
I disagree that this is a good idea. You have a computer that has *far* more memory for read-caching than the drive does, and more knowledge about what is going to be needed when. Unless you frequently use ancient operating systems, work with *huge* databases that you can't buy enough RAM to cache or have very unusual usage patterns where caching does no good (such as a backup server), you're much better off with more memory. Furthermore, faster drives are noisier, get hotter, and don't last as long. The only major theoretical advantage you can get from getting a fancier drive is a nicer scheduler than the host can offer, because the controller knows where the read head is.
I use motherboards with the fastest system bus offered.
I concur.
I buy as much memory as I can afford.
I agree that memory is the most important overlooked factor, but it's also easy to upgrade and gets cheaper over time.
Frankly, folks are likely to get better improvements (and save more) by poking at the software than the hardware.
Bullshit.
At the very least, I remember comparing the K6-2 to the PII at the time. The PII had *much* better performance. It wasn't until after the K6-2 that AMD got competitive.
I started this series, and finished it out of sheer "I want to say that I've managed to get through the whole thing".
It does have some things that I like I think that Covenant (the main character) is a bit over-the-top when it comes to self-loathing, but despite that, it's interesting to see a series that focuses so much on despair. The magic is interesting -- a ring that can be phenomenally powerful, but only occasionally, and tends not to be there when one would like.
That being said, the read is also very tedious. I'd even call it the most tedious fantasy series I've ever read, and I tend to like fantasies that one reads slowly through (Paula Volsky is a hellofa writer). The books are quite similar to each other and start to blur together. At some point, you get tired of the sheer overload of "pure and clean" and "dark and twisted" and "appears clean, but is actually corrupted" imagery. At six books, each book having about a zillion pages and spending a huge portion of its time in this kind of imagery, it doesn't take a short attention span to start to wonder whether there's anything else.
Second, while the darkness of the series is nice for a change, I at least occasionally like to see good things happen. Real life at its worst just isn't anything like this. Covenant just loses, loses more, appears to gain and then the reader realizes that he actually lost. Just when you think things can't get worse, they do. All through the series.
Third, Covenant is a caricature. The reader cannot identify with him. I like my main characters to be understandable -- something where I have a vague idea why and how they operate. Covenant is just too much.
I agree with one respondent that you're too harsh on Covenant for the rape of the teenage girl. There were some awfully extenuating circumstances...and most of the rest of the series deals with Covenant's self-loathing for what he's done and what follows.
If Donaldson sped up his books -- a lot -- and varied his theme from purity/corruption over the *huge* number of pages in the series, I think that there might really be something there.
First, I have to admit that I had to look this up -- this is not from my head. :-)
However, the beta testing phase at a software company is generally defined as being a phase in the software life cycle during which the software is being tested to find any possible incompatibilities or user problems outside of the (small) initial development testing group. It is an phase that has one purpose -- to verify and test the software.
There is provision made in case law for experimental use, which does not start the one year patent application clock running.
Note that it is possible to call something a "beta" release, but still not have it be protected. The purpose of the release must be to test the software. I know a couple of packages that have been in "beta" for ages and are widely used. It's the purpose of the release, not the name that matters.
However, I'd say that Microsoft would have a pretty good case that their Chicago release was for experimental purposes.
I'd say it sounds like it came from a meeting with a bunch of PR people at which there was one bored lawyer who was required to submit a skeleton document to build the press release around. There are lots of legal tidbits, but no cohesive legal argument, and most of the material is just PR swipes at Red Hat, the FSF, IBM, etc.
This is serioulsy bold, and slanderous statement of this guy to make, and I'm wondering who's going to be the first to open a can of lawsuit ass on SCO.
Libelious. It was in written form, not spoken.
By McBride's reckoning, the GPL deprives creators of their right to profit from their creations if they incorporate GPL'd code into their creation.
I'd be facinated to see how this differs from SCO's own far-more-draconian limitations on use of *their* IP....which they're in a court case with IBM about right now.
It really is quite insane. I mean, hat off to Darl for having the biggest pair of balls of all time, but despite his ambition, he's too incompetent to pull off his dreams. He's awful at PR and has made a bunch of claims that conflict with his lawyers. He tends to get steamed and lose control. He gambled his entire company (and the money of his investors) on an utterly unworkable system. His letters are downright incomprehensible and illogical.
GPL licensing isn't really giving up copyright protection. You've always been able to do that, just by placing something in the public domain. The GPL is just a fairly unusual license that deals with copyright.
It's kind of funny -- Darl claiming that he's fighting for copyright and justice and that the global economy depends on this case...and yet, the GPL works within the bounds of copyright, and most users of it are pretty happy, and the GPL's popularity has increased exponentially for years. SCO's own licensing schemes have crumbled in upon themselves, have on numberous times made bogus legal claims and tried to bend the law (such as refusing to disclose what code violated IBM's license to IBM after a judge ordered disclosure).
As for protecting technological advancement -- Darl, Linux is far more technologically advanced than SCO Unix. Furthermore, it's used in far more products, and facilitates research in a huge number of labs every day.
Darl's claims are so ludicrous that they start to enter the "so ridiculous that it's hard to get people to believe that he's really that far from the truth" zone.
If copyright didn't exist, the GPL could not exist -- everything would be public domain, and companies could release binary-only software.
I seriously doubt that RedHat has interest in blowing away copyright.
Most of this letter really is a straw man attack. It's not worth my time to punch holes in all of Darl's claims, but among other flaws:
(A) Darl claims that the GPL violates the Constitution and a number of other things. All "evidence", weak as it is, deals entirely with his claims about the motivations of several groups of people that happen to use the GPL. It has nothing to do with the GPL itself. This is a logical fallacy, on the order of saying "Bob owns a gun and Bob owns a big truck, so anyone owning a gun uses an excessive amount of gas".
(B) It's pretty clear that RH doesn't want to eliminate copyrights. Software patents are a significant disaster -- they are in a few company's corporate interests, but you will be very hard-pressed to find *any* engineer that supports them.
(C) McBride claimed that the GPL is invalid. Again. I'm wondering how he intends to argue that SCO didn't massively infringe copyrights of thousands of parties by then distributing Linux. Again. Same old, same old.
(D) McBride lies, and is happy to deliberately mislead people. We have seen this over and over and over in his claims and releases for almost a year now. It would be more of a surprise to find that he's being honest than that he's lying again.