Oh, B/Vs priorites aren't screwed up. They're right on target. They know that companies can abuse the legal system if they're willing to throw down enough money, and I'm sure that they intend to do exactly that.
Your analogy is totally incorrect. Shoplifting is illegal, same as pirating games is.
The difference is that 7-11 goes after the shoplifting kids, and Blizzard, instead of going after the pirates, is going after a bunch of open source authors.
The DMCA prevents people from making and distributing devices which are primarily intended for the purpose of circumventing copy control mechanisms. Blizzard thinks that this is the purpose of bnetd and are going after them under the DMCA. After a bit, Blizzard realized that their claims were complete shit, and decided to buff them up a bit more.
The court filing contains claims of trademark infringement (for the name "bnetd", based on the fact that Blizzard has a service called "Battle.net")...frankly, very weak. You'd have to get very lucky for this to get by the courty. You're arguing that you can contract, use a slang term and then a logical extension (the d for daemon) and then that the game-playing services offered by Internet Gateway (which ran a bnetd server) which are *associated* with, not *called* the "bnetd" service are violating trademark law. That's pretty laughable, but it fits the shotgun approach most lawyers take if they don't have a lot to work with.
Trademark law is the only time you need to sue early. The copyright infringement Blizzard has no reason to rush on.
Blizzard claimed that the bnetd people stole code from them. I'm quite dubious as to *how* they'd get source from Blizzard. Reverse engineering for the purposes of compatibility over a network is *specifically* allowed by the DMCA, so Blizzard can't be complaining about code reverse engineered from the binary. Their main evidence for this is that the bnetd people reimplemented a bug in the Blizzard code. Frankly, if you're trying to reproduce the same effects, you reproduce bugs too -- look at the WINE project reproducing Windows bugs. This is pretty bogus too.
They claim "false designation of origin". Don't know where this is coming from, don't remember seeing anything about it before.
Blizzard may *want* bnetd to go away, but a) I don't support Blizzard because bnetd is a neat project, the people put in a lot of work, and the consumers benefit and b) They don't have any legal ground for complaint.
There are a lot of legal grey area projects that keep going. Napster, Gnutella, and all the other P2P stuff...much of this code is written by volunteers, not stupid dot-commers. Matter of fact, P2P is probably *the* largest single area of volunteer code contributions in the last few years.
DiVX and LAME both have possible patent issues, but they keep going.
DAEMON Tools is a fairly pirate-ish set of tools for mounting disk images on Windows. I was quite impressed by the quality -- like Shrinkwrap for the Mac or the standard Linux loopback mount.
All the CSS-using stuff for Linux. Heck of a lot of work there, despite a lot of lawyers being thrown at them.
As long as IRC exists, it's easy to coordinate people who want to hack around on software. Having a central code repository like SourceForge is nice but not necessary.
So what? Blizzard has no legal right to do what they're trying to pull. Whether their current approach to the market can be a money making one is debatable, yes. That doesn't mean they have a right to do whatever they feel like to make that model work.
For example, if I give out $10 to every passerby in Manhattan and ask them to give me $20 tomorrow at the same place if they accept, it may well be that those people are going to break their agreement. But that's because my business model doesn't work the way I want it to work. It doesn't mean that I can threaten them with a shotgun right after they accept the money and tell them that if they don't pay me back, I'll kill them, even if that meant that I'd get my $20 and make my business work. Saying that "my business model doesn't work unless I have the ability to do this" simply does not give you the right to do whatever it is. Under our current laws and current society, this sort of business may just not be feasible. The law does not guarantee you the right to make a way to make this thing feasible.
Put another way, if people don't like the MS XP subscription policy, MS can't run out and tell people that they're going to bribe local politicians to cut off holdouts' water. MS has no guarantee that their business model will work.
Blizzard needs to back down on this one. They are being the Bad Guys here. If they really think they can't operate w/o bnet existing, they need to modify their products so that bnet is not an issue...or go out of business.
If a bank had a policy of not coughing up your records but didn't have as good an interest rate (to make up for their legal costs), would you still open accounts there?
Mandrake and RH are not significantly different, and you're experienced with RH's conventions.
RH offers a bit more compatibility -- there are more third party people packaging and testing on RH than Mandrake by sheer dint of the number of people using RH.
RH tends to have a bit more of a GNOME flavor (RH puts lots of money into GNOME and uses it as a default and adopts GNOME stuff quickly) and Mandrake has bit more of a KDE flavor (same thing, but with KDE). I personally prefer GNOME, but YMMV.
Rendering a web page (particularly a Google web page) is pretty lightweight. Searching through the contents of a significant portion of the textual Web is another thing, regardless of what neat tricks and preindexing you use.
ls -l/bin/laden probably already yields crwxrwxrwx 1 mullahomar alqaeda
Re:From the article...
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
Oh, knock it off. The humanitarian side of this article was awful, yes. But it would be interesting if he really could sent a neutron back in time. At the least, major philosophical and physical implications.
"For every DC sold, Sega would lose $100. Tell me how you can be in debt, and be losing $100 on every system sold..."
Yes? And?
Every console manufacturer runs into this. They sell below cost, and eat it on the initial cost, and make their money back on games. They have to sell enough consoles and then enough games per console to win out. Sega would never have made the initial investment if they didn't plan to follow through. They aren't stupid -- they did the math.
They just failed to sell enough consoles and enough games per consoles.
Sega is probably the company that most impressively exemplifies awful product release timing that I know of. They released the Master System...which was overshadowed by the NES. They released the Genesis...not long before the SNES came out. In each case, they were technically behind their primary competition for the majority of the life of the product.
Then they went into a spastic series of releases of all sorts of bizarre systems. Nomad. 32X. Saturn. Each system they sold cost them money, each incompatible system splintered the game market and resulted in game developers less willing to develop for the market, and hence less game sales and less money for themselves.
Finally, the DC is (IMHO) the worst-engineered game console I've used, at least from an external perspective. It's my least favorite of Sega's offerings. The case is flimsy, the drive loud, the analog stick flimsy, the buttons not rubberized, the D-pad blister-inducing, the whole controller bulky, and idiotically enough, the memcards mounted on the controllers. How are you going to sell replacement/alternate controllers if you have to include the cost of a memcard interface on everything? Just plain bad engineering.
Sega had a business plan. They screwed it up, but they were hardly a dot com. They didn't sell enough games. Some of it was bad luck, some of it bad timing and engineering on their part, but at the bottom of it, Sega was largely to blame for Sega eating it.
Sega has never had as many decent games as their competitors. The Genesis/SNES era was when Sega had the most going for it, and even then there wasn't much for Sega. I've never liked the Sonic series (well, or the Mario series:-) ), some of the really good games were available on the Genesis and SNES (and frequently more technically advanced in the SNES version), and there were simply more SNES games. Besides which, after using six buttons, three was just plain too few.
Agreed. Slashdot should have a "no nytimes links" rule. There are other people that carry just about everything on nytimes...look at Google Headlines for related links.
Good post, but wanted to point out that LCDs are not more advanced than CRTs...they're alternate technology, not replacement. We don't have to switch to LCD.
I have no idea what this "square pixel" thing that the grandparent of this post is talkign about is.
However, (2) is just silly. Yes, a cheap LCD has a narrow viewing angle. However, the fancy LCD ones are hideously expensive. For what you'll pay for a top-notch LCD you can get a professional graphics CRT.
Gamma is poor because the contrast simply can't be as high on an LCD as it is on a CRT, and finally colors shift on *every* LCD I've ever seen, given a sufficiently different angle.
LCDs are *way* overrated. Yes, they're useful if you're really going to use their pluses (you need to conserve power or you need the sharper image). However, they have drawbacks (dead pixels, less color accuracy and vibrancy, bad refresh rate) that at least for me, more than eliminate all their advantages.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, B/Vs priorites aren't screwed up. They're right on target. They know that companies can abuse the legal system if they're willing to throw down enough money, and I'm sure that they intend to do exactly that.
Your analogy is totally incorrect. Shoplifting is illegal, same as pirating games is.
The difference is that 7-11 goes after the shoplifting kids, and Blizzard, instead of going after the pirates, is going after a bunch of open source authors.
The issue is the following.
The DMCA prevents people from making and distributing devices which are primarily intended for the purpose of circumventing copy control mechanisms. Blizzard thinks that this is the purpose of bnetd and are going after them under the DMCA. After a bit, Blizzard realized that their claims were complete shit, and decided to buff them up a bit more.
The court filing contains claims of trademark infringement (for the name "bnetd", based on the fact that Blizzard has a service called "Battle.net")...frankly, very weak. You'd have to get very lucky for this to get by the courty. You're arguing that you can contract, use a slang term and then a logical extension (the d for daemon) and then that the game-playing services offered by Internet Gateway (which ran a bnetd server) which are *associated* with, not *called* the "bnetd" service are violating trademark law. That's pretty laughable, but it fits the shotgun approach most lawyers take if they don't have a lot to work with.
Trademark law is the only time you need to sue early. The copyright infringement Blizzard has no reason to rush on.
Blizzard claimed that the bnetd people stole code from them. I'm quite dubious as to *how* they'd get source from Blizzard. Reverse engineering for the purposes of compatibility over a network is *specifically* allowed by the DMCA, so Blizzard can't be complaining about code reverse engineered from the binary. Their main evidence for this is that the bnetd people reimplemented a bug in the Blizzard code. Frankly, if you're trying to reproduce the same effects, you reproduce bugs too -- look at the WINE project reproducing Windows bugs. This is pretty bogus too.
They claim "false designation of origin". Don't know where this is coming from, don't remember seeing anything about it before.
Blizzard may *want* bnetd to go away, but a) I don't support Blizzard because bnetd is a neat project, the people put in a lot of work, and the consumers benefit and b) They don't have any legal ground for complaint.
There are a lot of legal grey area projects that keep going. Napster, Gnutella, and all the other P2P stuff...much of this code is written by volunteers, not stupid dot-commers. Matter of fact, P2P is probably *the* largest single area of volunteer code contributions in the last few years.
DiVX and LAME both have possible patent issues, but they keep going.
DAEMON Tools is a fairly pirate-ish set of tools for mounting disk images on Windows. I was quite impressed by the quality -- like Shrinkwrap for the Mac or the standard Linux loopback mount.
All the CSS-using stuff for Linux. Heck of a lot of work there, despite a lot of lawyers being thrown at them.
As long as IRC exists, it's easy to coordinate people who want to hack around on software. Having a central code repository like SourceForge is nice but not necessary.
So what? Blizzard has no legal right to do what they're trying to pull. Whether their current approach to the market can be a money making one is debatable, yes. That doesn't mean they have a right to do whatever they feel like to make that model work.
For example, if I give out $10 to every passerby in Manhattan and ask them to give me $20 tomorrow at the same place if they accept, it may well be that those people are going to break their agreement. But that's because my business model doesn't work the way I want it to work. It doesn't mean that I can threaten them with a shotgun right after they accept the money and tell them that if they don't pay me back, I'll kill them, even if that meant that I'd get my $20 and make my business work. Saying that "my business model doesn't work unless I have the ability to do this" simply does not give you the right to do whatever it is. Under our current laws and current society, this sort of business may just not be feasible. The law does not guarantee you the right to make a way to make this thing feasible.
Put another way, if people don't like the MS XP subscription policy, MS can't run out and tell people that they're going to bribe local politicians to cut off holdouts' water. MS has no guarantee that their business model will work.
Blizzard needs to back down on this one. They are being the Bad Guys here. If they really think they can't operate w/o bnet existing, they need to modify their products so that bnet is not an issue...or go out of business.
Heh. I thought I was the only one that noticed his name coming up frequently...
If a bank had a policy of not coughing up your records but didn't have as good an interest rate (to make up for their legal costs), would you still open accounts there?
You're fine where you are, IMHO.
Mandrake and RH are not significantly different, and you're experienced with RH's conventions.
RH offers a bit more compatibility -- there are more third party people packaging and testing on RH than Mandrake by sheer dint of the number of people using RH.
RH tends to have a bit more of a GNOME flavor (RH puts lots of money into GNOME and uses it as a default and adopts GNOME stuff quickly) and Mandrake has bit more of a KDE flavor (same thing, but with KDE). I personally prefer GNOME, but YMMV.
I suspect that there are more Red Hat boxes being used as desktops than Mandrake boxes.
Put those servers in a monorail car so that you can roll 'em upstairs from the bunker when you want to poke at them.
That's what I assumed they were talking about at first. Heck, wouldn't surprise me if it's already SOAP-enabled.
With the SOAP results, not the HTML ones, silly.
I would be surprised.
Rendering a web page (particularly a Google web page) is pretty lightweight. Searching through the contents of a significant portion of the textual Web is another thing, regardless of what neat tricks and preindexing you use.
ls -l /bin/laden probably already yields
crwxrwxrwx 1 mullahomar alqaeda
Oh, knock it off. The humanitarian side of this article was awful, yes. But it would be interesting if he really could sent a neutron back in time. At the least, major philosophical and physical implications.
Wow. A) That's not what I'd expect from a prof...take a look and B) I love the IE thing. :-)
"For every DC sold, Sega would lose $100. Tell me how you can be in debt, and be losing $100 on every system sold..."
:-) ), some of the really good games were available on the Genesis and SNES (and frequently more technically advanced in the SNES version), and there were simply more SNES games. Besides which, after using six buttons, three was just plain too few.
Yes? And?
Every console manufacturer runs into this. They sell below cost, and eat it on the initial cost, and make their money back on games. They have to sell enough consoles and then enough games per console to win out. Sega would never have made the initial investment if they didn't plan to follow through. They aren't stupid -- they did the math.
They just failed to sell enough consoles and enough games per consoles.
Sega is probably the company that most impressively exemplifies awful product release timing that I know of. They released the Master System...which was overshadowed by the NES. They released the Genesis...not long before the SNES came out. In each case, they were technically behind their primary competition for the majority of the life of the product.
Then they went into a spastic series of releases of all sorts of bizarre systems. Nomad. 32X. Saturn. Each system they sold cost them money, each incompatible system splintered the game market and resulted in game developers less willing to develop for the market, and hence less game sales and less money for themselves.
Finally, the DC is (IMHO) the worst-engineered game console I've used, at least from an external perspective. It's my least favorite of Sega's offerings. The case is flimsy, the drive loud, the analog stick flimsy, the buttons not rubberized, the D-pad blister-inducing, the whole controller bulky, and idiotically enough, the memcards mounted on the controllers. How are you going to sell replacement/alternate controllers if you have to include the cost of a memcard interface on everything? Just plain bad engineering.
Sega had a business plan. They screwed it up, but they were hardly a dot com. They didn't sell enough games. Some of it was bad luck, some of it bad timing and engineering on their part, but at the bottom of it, Sega was largely to blame for Sega eating it.
Sega has never had as many decent games as their competitors. The Genesis/SNES era was when Sega had the most going for it, and even then there wasn't much for Sega. I've never liked the Sonic series (well, or the Mario series
It's from the wonderful dungeon crawling game Angband. If you've never played angband before and can afford to take a GPA hit, go for it.
Agreed. Slashdot should have a "no nytimes links" rule. There are other people that carry just about everything on nytimes...look at Google Headlines for related links.
Good post, but wanted to point out that LCDs are not more advanced than CRTs...they're alternate technology, not replacement. We don't have to switch to LCD.
I have no idea what this "square pixel" thing that the grandparent of this post is talkign about is.
However, (2) is just silly. Yes, a cheap LCD has a narrow viewing angle. However, the fancy LCD ones are hideously expensive. For what you'll pay for a top-notch LCD you can get a professional graphics CRT.
Gamma is poor because the contrast simply can't be as high on an LCD as it is on a CRT, and finally colors shift on *every* LCD I've ever seen, given a sufficiently different angle.
LCDs are *way* overrated. Yes, they're useful if you're really going to use their pluses (you need to conserve power or you need the sharper image). However, they have drawbacks (dead pixels, less color accuracy and vibrancy, bad refresh rate) that at least for me, more than eliminate all their advantages.
Well, not necessarily.
LCDs are slightly sharper. However, sometimes (as with photos) it's better to have the pixels blend into each other.
Otherwise, we'd all be using thermal wax printers instead of dye sublimation printers. Sometimes the blending is useful.
And there are image artifacts that are more easily visible on CRTs, as well.
The good, the bad, and the ugly:
LCDs:
Sharper
Lighter
Smaller
Lower power
Conclusion: nice for emacs
CRTs:
More intense color/brightness
Better refresh
More accurate color
No dead pixels
Many resolutions
Cheaper
Conclusion: Better for games, movies
Starcraft ran under WINE too...those of us with Linux could play as well.
IIRC, Spectre came out first for the Mac, and there were more releases of it (Spectre VR may have been the last), but there were PC versions.