Your problem has nothing to do with "cheese" (I can understand cheating complaints, where there is clearly a bug in the implementation, but that's different). I can think of very few games that actually do not provide you with any way to counter "cheesy" tactics. Many are difficult to counter, and may force you to lose once you make one initial mistake (failing to counter something), but it sounds more like you are simply out of your depth.
Your problem is that you are playing with people who play more than you do, and have a higher skill level. As a result, you are not having fun. Most people would feel the same way. I played Team Fortress until I got at least passable at it, but I still can't even touch the really good players.
The problem is threefold:
(a: Psyche) People like to win more than they lose. People like to play against other people because they provide an "AI" unparalleled in complexity. This is bound to produce problems. I think that the only answer to this is a modification of game design -- either produce cooperative multiplayer games (Halo, for instance, is not all that fantastic or balanced in competitive mode, but is a very good cooperative game), produce games with scores rather than binary "win/lose" conditions, or play games that have multiple players, but the player is competing against their own historical behavior in some way, rather than the other players.
(b: Timeframe) Once a game has been out for a while, there will be people that purchased the game and played it day in and day out. As a result, they will be more experienced than anyone else. This makes it very difficult to "get in" on an older multiplayer competitive game. (Note that I find that team-based games can help alleviate this -- your teammates can pick up some of the slack while you learn what's going on, and many such games let you make useful contributions without being a top dog yet).
(c: Dedication) I like to win (feels good:-) ), but I do not have the time or interest to put in a game that a fifteen-year-old kid will have. That doesn't mean that I want to continue to play a game where I keep losing (especially if they keep losing).
Now, there are a lot of things that have changed. "Camping" was a real problem back in the days of, say, Quake 1, but games have been improved to largely avoid (or seriously alleviate) "camping". Cheating everyone objects to. "Cheese" is simply (if I had to come up with a definition) apparently not-difficult tactics that are difficult to counter.
I think that generally, complaining about "cheesy" tactics is a bad idea. Games are designed and balanced better these days. On the other hand, playing a game that is intended to be open-ended and allow you to try many different tactics, and then forcing you to work on one particular difficult tactic to counter someone's "cheesy" tactic is, obviously, less fun. However, if we expect people to follow unwritten rules, we create a lot of problems -- especially since what one person considers "cheesy", another does not. That, I think, means a lot of arguments in the brewing.
The Quake server design (and similar games) fixes some of this. Server operators can choose parameters for the game they serve, so players can play a game in which the tactics that they consider "cheesy" are reduced in strength or less worthwhile.
In general, though, I think that the game rules should be considered to be like the written law that we abide by in Real Life -- there is significant value in adhering to that law, simply because everyone recognizes a single line of legality and illegality.
If, of course, you want to agree ahead of time to play with certain constraints with someone (if you can do it, in an unwritten manner), it's quite reasonable to play like this. If you want to play with a good friend, and both of you hate tank-rushers, and you have both been consciously avoiding tank-rushing each other for a year, then it seems reasonable to expect that frie
Competitive games are about winning within the rules of the game... if you make up your own rules about honor, you are playing a different game that you've made up && you have no basis in reality or even agreeable reason. Scrubs cry "unfair!" but they just need an excuse to soften the blow that they can't defeat a simple tactic or that their game does not stand up well to serious competition. Do you want to win or whine?
To be entirely fair -- up until recently, many games had low production budgets, and were less well tested on multiplayer games, and had very simple and difficult-to-counter tactics (or tactics for which the countering prevented anyone from experiencing the larger portion of the game). In general, I agree that a game that allows true "cheesiness" is broken at a design level -- however, it's hard to find a perfect game.
Regarding Soul Calibur II requiring very little skill: Think again. Soul Calibur II was designed to have a more gradual learning curve than most other fighters on purpose to be easy to pick up but don't kid yourself in thinking your "beginner attacks" could in any dreamworld be "more powerful than any advanced player's most complex combo attack". You are way off base. If this is your opinion, I know I could defeat you 63/0 with one hand. Enter a competition to test your theory rather than replying with some anecdotal evidence about your living room experiences.
I agree absolutely. Soul Calibur II has one of the best curves ever. A new player can sit down, pick up a controller, and without much idea what they're doing, do lots of cool-looking moves and do a fair amount of damage. Skill *definitely* makes people better (and you can improve yourself a huge amount, given that a complete mastery of the game involves knowing all of everyone's moves and being able to distinguish between almost all of them instantly), but it takes a lot of skill to make a small difference in gameplay. When combined with the handicap feature, Soul Calibur II can be fun for even fairly new players playing against fairly decent players.
Almost all the unblockables in SC2 are very slow. I doubt you're going to find something that you can reliably repeatedly pull off that's also unblockable.
If they really only have one thing that they can do better than you, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect you to figure out how to leverage your superior skill in other areas to win?
I'd personally like it if the computer characters had AI that changes personality. Take the beta testers, and use thier styles to shape various AI setups. It'll make the player be more well rounded and fill holes in thier style.
Frequently, game manufacturers have trouble with piracy. The easiest way they have to work around piracy is to convert the game into a "service", so that you miss out on significant functionality if you pirate the game. Half-Life, for instance -- sure, players can pirate the game, but the auth system makes Internet multiplayer (such as Counterstrike) difficult.
Providing a game (especially a fighting game) that has a game engine that transmits player actions back to the developer, who then sends out updated AIs based on learned behavior from what players are doing would provide good, ongoing challenge. Since this is not a realtime activity, it would work nicely over even a cheap ol' IP connection. Use a neural net or something.
When you beat someone with tactics that they are unprepared for and not experienced in countering, they get frusterated and angry.
It happened to the British in the American Revolutionary War -- "hiding behind trees and rocks is unfair and cowardly!".
It happened to the US in Vietnam -- "using ununiformed troops and ability to blend into civilian environments is unfair and cowardly!"
Now it's happening to the US again in the form of bin Laden's tactics -- hit and run, avoiding allowing the enemy to get a good swing at you, attacking vulnerable points.
War is war. It is not a card game. If you want to play a limited strategy game where certain behavior is prohibited and you want to see who wins with such constraints and you have agreed on such behavior, with either technological or social power to enforce these constraints, that's one thing. If someone is playing an FPS, they should by default expect someone not to make the most of the map, the game system, their abilities, and the weaknesses in that player's own playing style.
It is extremely difficult to be "cheesy" in SC2, at least, at anything other than a beginner level. Being predictable is exactly what will get the bajeezus beaten out of you -- once the other person gets your timing down, they will guard-impact you and proceed to beat you senseless.
As for characters that just have combos with a number of hits, like Ivy or Sophitia or Xiang Hua, that's just part of the character's style.
A game that allows a player to be "cheesy" is, IMHO, flawed.
Linux has a lot of good stuff, but Red Hat leaves out some goodies that I like to use (some of these are available in the main third-party repositories):
I used to install yafc (best CLI FTP client out there, with good colorization and, unlike lftp, the ability to interact with local files and pipe things to shell commands), but apparently the maintainer has just decided to stop maintaining it. Ack!
I like to install atool. This is basically an intelligent (text-based) frontend to all the archive-handling tools out there. You just type aunpack <archive-name> and it checks the type and decompresses the archive. If there are multiple files in the root of the archive, it creates a new directory and puts them all in it.
WINE. WINE may not be perfect, but when you want to use a Windows program, you'll be glad that you have it set up.
mplayer. It's the most capable video player out there for Linux, even if some of the more advanced capabilities might be a bit intimidating at first.
Two tools -- one a small C program that I wrote that runs the program and arguments passed it "as a daemon" -- detached from a terminal. This is useful for running something that you want to keep running in the background without the ability to output crud to the screen. The second is a pair of scripts that provide a version of xargs' functionality, but escape spaces and the like, so that one can use xargs on files with spaces in their names.
Valgrind. Valgrind is a very good memory debugger. Red Hat does not include it in the base distribution because of patent issues (/me hates software patents and the damage they do to the software development area). Exclusion of valgrind is a significant factor in increasing software bugginess. God, I wish the US had EU-style patent law.
Or, they say, 'If we cannot wait, we need SCO to tell us what we are infringing upon with specificity.' Since we know how SCO will answer the second question, and the court likely will too, since they amended the filings from SCO v IBM and SCO v RedHat and SCO v Novell, it seems to me (IANAL) that they should get to wait."
You mean how they'll answer based on the IBM case?
SCO: "Your honor, in order to list the lines with specificity, we need a copy of AutoZone's customer database, of their parts blueprints, and of all source involved with moving away from any SCO products."
Ignoring the parent post just because it's trolling is silly -- it offers a good opportunity to clarify the points involved.
Only clueless fanboys would give a damn about under which license their drivers are distributed. As long as they do what they're supposed, so what?
The kernel developers have a tainting system in place because they won't debug kernels that have drivers loaded that are closed-source. It's too hard for them to tell whether that driver might have been responsible, and very difficult for them to fix any problems.
Try seeing how interested Microsoft is with fixing problems in other people's proprietary drivers. It's not all that high.
This is different from something meaningful, like Microsoft's excellent WHLQ certification. I'm surprised that no other vendor, including LinuxOS Inc., has copied the idea of certified drivers yet. Microsoft has taken the initiative to take responsibility, this is something that the GPG/Linux community needs to copy.
WHQL is primarily a mechanism designed to give Microsoft strategic power in the software market. It has little to do with software quality, though it is billed as such (just as DRM is billed as an anti-virus/malware scheme by MS). It is intended to grant them ultimate authority over what software is released for their system -- they have the power to refuse to sign any driver release if they need to do so as a lever, which gives them tremendous power over device manufacturers. This is tremenously more powerful and intrusive than the Linux driver tainting system, which works on an honor system. WHQL ensures only basic functionality is in place -- WHQL testing does not involve audititing code, checking for corner cases, or do any of the things necessary to produce a good, bug-free driver.
I prefer to develop my modules under the revised BSD license, so that others can port them to the BSDs without running into licensing issues. However, Linux will mark the kernel as tainted when a BSD-licensed module is inserted. So I mark them as Dual GPL/BSD, so that they can be loaded without complaints, although I really don't want to release them under GPL, as that would pose a risk that others add code under GPL that could then not be used in the BSDs.
They could do so anyway. BSD-licensed code can be relicensed to GPL-licensed code.
You know, if there really was a direct parallel here, I imagine it would be something like this.
The RIAA would give away their entire music library for free, *including* the individual samples and source data, with the sole proviso that people not take their samples and include them in music where the sample data is not in turn released.
Then someone ran out and sold a song that swiped RIAA member samples without releasing their own.
That would probably get people on the side of the RIAA, yes.
BUT... the linux kernel developers need to get over their fanaticism about open-source drivers.
That's ridiculous. The only thing they're doing is not troubleshooting systems with drivers that they can't have the source to. It makes it incredibly difficult to debug a kernel when there's a driver running with access to the kernel's memory and something is breaking.
Plus, as a user, I'd rather see more pressure for vendors to move to open-source, and this provides that. I derive a good deal of indirect benefit from open-source drivers, and this puts more direct pressure on vendors.
You'd have to read the list for exact details of what's irritating the people specifically, but here's a link.
Basically, Linux and friends (in frusteration at trying to troubleshoot non-open-source drivers, where they can't tell what's going on or fix anything) introduced a "tainting" system. Basically, they refuse to handle bug reports or fix anything on a system that has any "tainted" modules loaded.
This tends to increase direct customer dissatisfaction with closed-source drivers.
However, there is an matter of the public welfare to consider here. There is no public good that could come of people knowing my dirty secrets, but it is very much in the public's interest for citizens to know exactly what hands we're placing our votes* in.
The thing is, if that's the case then this should explicitly be made all right -- that "documents relating to voting are public, and that this obligation overrides all confidentiality guarantees", for instance.
"Anybody but Bush" is a very, very dangerous path to tread. I'll vote for Kerry if I think I wouldn't mind him as president, but if he pisses me off the way Gore did, a minor party will be getting my vote again.
The problem is that a couple of people taking an ideological stand were what put Bush in the White House in the first place. Nobody wants to see that happen again. Let me be blunt -- the Green Party, the Communist Party, whoever -- they aren't going to get anyone in as the president. This isn't an attempt to keep them from winning -- they just currently don't have enough popular support. We know this from polls, where people don't have any incentive to poll in favor of the Dems or the GOP.
By "voting for someone else", you aren't doing anything particularly ethical. You are simply throwing your vote away. You *know* that this means that you are handing the influence that you could have had over to the masses, which currently slightly favor Bush. You cannot "wash your hands of the mess" by voting Green.
I agree that a revised voting system would be better (starting with removing the electoral college, and next going to a multi-choice system). However, if Green really isn't going to win, you do nobody any good by voting Green.
It'd be very difficult for them to do anything else at this point.
Trusted computing is M$ FUD.
FUD != BS. FUD is spreading unfounded and vague worries about something. FUD is a very specific subset of BS. Trusted computing as an idea is not only pushed by MS, but by all those random little companies that keep popping up with ideas to control content that don't work. It's a useful tool to extract money from media companies. It (at least in the general purpose computing arena) has little chance of becoming practically usable.
The DMCA was written by technology and entertainment companies to protect a dying business model. Then enacted by a techonlogicaly illiterate Congress.
Mmm...maybe.
There are obviously severe issues with attempting to enforce the DMCA. However, remember that there are severe issues with attempt to enforce copyright offline, as well. When copyright started, you could whip out your printing press and knock off tons of copies. When Mark Twain was working on strengthening copyright internationally, it was common for people to rip off books. The DMCA is an attempt to deal with this in the only remotely practical way -- by preventing people from producing distributing tools designed to bypass copy protection mechanisms. Frankly, I don't think that it will work, and I'm tremendously irritated by the restrictions on what I can do. However, you don't have to be technologically illiterate to back the DMCA -- it codifies probably the most effective way to attack copyright infringement on the Internet. (The question of whether that way is very effective at all is certainly valid.)
In short, none of these groups really know what they are doing.
I disagree.
* Diebold got their money for the voting machines, and is sitting pretty. They know what they're doing.
* MS has gotten interest in their formats (such as wma) as "content protecting", and is using this oomph to go after the electronic music distribution market that Apple currently dominates (and, I would expect, eventually the video market). While they may not succeed, MS has stabbed Apple in the guts before rather nastily, and it's not unreasonable to think that they'll manage to beat Apple again. They know what they're doing.
* The DMCA is a *great* advantage for content provider companies, and pushing it is one of the biggest wins content providers have had for a while. If they move to e-distribution (and away from their current "dying business model"), it will *still* be a powerful club. They know what they're doing.
* Congress got their campaign contributions from the content providing industry. In general, I'd say that they probably know what they're doing. However, enough bad PR has been raised by anti-DMCA activists that a few legislators are working to temper things (such as the legislators that publically opposed the suing of the 14-year-old girl), so perhaps the move was not a good one.
On the whole, only Congress seems to have made a move that might not be in their interests, and that's debatable.
IMHO, ISO 900x is mostly a money game for certification companies, and a political tool used to exclude various companies from doing business in markets. It sounds good; it doesn't mean much.
Darl will never end up in jail over this. CEOs almost *never* go to jail for what their companies do. I was a little hopeful about fraud suits early on, but it looks like that isn't going to happen.
I agree that McBride's screwups have helped things immensely.
You were convinced by MS ot invest in SCO despite them havign no IT Ligation exp in IP lawsuits on the basis of what as theri Unix business is dead?
While Darl and friends really *aren't* the most ept at IP litigation (view the numerous mistakes made), and both Darl and Baystar pretty well qualify as scum (trying to push a set of claims that everyone involved pretty clearly knows is bogus, and en route damaging a project that tens of thousands of very bright people have built with their volunteer time), I doubt that Baystar is *really* thinking that they have a chance if senior management is switched at SCO.
It's not that uncommon to throw the CEO to the wolves (by which I mean "let go with a golden parachute to seek employment elsewhere") when things go sour, whether it's his fault or not.
The claim "focus less on UNIX and more on litigation" is, from what I know, pretty silly. SCO has been doing jack for their UNIX properties already -- Baystar may just be putting up a front of "we knew the right thing to do, SCO was a good investment, but their management screwed it up".
Oh, and as for people who say "they're only in it for the money" WRT Darl and Baystar -- yeah, no kidding. We formed a social and legal system that made money the sole master, where corporate executives are responsible only to shareholders, and only to increasing stock value. There is no provision in our legal system for, say, gross unethical action. Darl and all the MBAs and lawyers involved are doing *exactly* what we've chosen to have society reward them for. It's hard to complain when they do exactly that. If we want them to do something else, we need to make provision for that in law.
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And michael said I had no life for simply having over 800 comments.....
Uh, oh.
I think the point when these gamers can admit to defeat and say "I got owned" is the point when they'll start enjoying the game.
I am disappointed that I already have a signature; I find your statement to be both pithy and insightful.
Your problem has nothing to do with "cheese" (I can understand cheating complaints, where there is clearly a bug in the implementation, but that's different). I can think of very few games that actually do not provide you with any way to counter "cheesy" tactics. Many are difficult to counter, and may force you to lose once you make one initial mistake (failing to counter something), but it sounds more like you are simply out of your depth.
:-) ), but I do not have the time or interest to put in a game that a fifteen-year-old kid will have. That doesn't mean that I want to continue to play a game where I keep losing (especially if they keep losing).
Your problem is that you are playing with people who play more than you do, and have a higher skill level. As a result, you are not having fun. Most people would feel the same way. I played Team Fortress until I got at least passable at it, but I still can't even touch the really good players.
The problem is threefold:
(a: Psyche) People like to win more than they lose. People like to play against other people because they provide an "AI" unparalleled in complexity. This is bound to produce problems. I think that the only answer to this is a modification of game design -- either produce cooperative multiplayer games (Halo, for instance, is not all that fantastic or balanced in competitive mode, but is a very good cooperative game), produce games with scores rather than binary "win/lose" conditions, or play games that have multiple players, but the player is competing against their own historical behavior in some way, rather than the other players.
(b: Timeframe) Once a game has been out for a while, there will be people that purchased the game and played it day in and day out. As a result, they will be more experienced than anyone else. This makes it very difficult to "get in" on an older multiplayer competitive game. (Note that I find that team-based games can help alleviate this -- your teammates can pick up some of the slack while you learn what's going on, and many such games let you make useful contributions without being a top dog yet).
(c: Dedication) I like to win (feels good
Now, there are a lot of things that have changed. "Camping" was a real problem back in the days of, say, Quake 1, but games have been improved to largely avoid (or seriously alleviate) "camping". Cheating everyone objects to. "Cheese" is simply (if I had to come up with a definition) apparently not-difficult tactics that are difficult to counter.
I think that generally, complaining about "cheesy" tactics is a bad idea. Games are designed and balanced better these days. On the other hand, playing a game that is intended to be open-ended and allow you to try many different tactics, and then forcing you to work on one particular difficult tactic to counter someone's "cheesy" tactic is, obviously, less fun. However, if we expect people to follow unwritten rules, we create a lot of problems -- especially since what one person considers "cheesy", another does not. That, I think, means a lot of arguments in the brewing.
The Quake server design (and similar games) fixes some of this. Server operators can choose parameters for the game they serve, so players can play a game in which the tactics that they consider "cheesy" are reduced in strength or less worthwhile.
In general, though, I think that the game rules should be considered to be like the written law that we abide by in Real Life -- there is significant value in adhering to that law, simply because everyone recognizes a single line of legality and illegality.
If, of course, you want to agree ahead of time to play with certain constraints with someone (if you can do it, in an unwritten manner), it's quite reasonable to play like this. If you want to play with a good friend, and both of you hate tank-rushers, and you have both been consciously avoiding tank-rushing each other for a year, then it seems reasonable to expect that frie
Competitive games are about winning within the rules of the game... if you make up your own rules about honor, you are playing a different game that you've made up && you have no basis in reality or even agreeable reason. Scrubs cry "unfair!" but they just need an excuse to soften the blow that they can't defeat a simple tactic or that their game does not stand up well to serious competition. Do you want to win or whine?
To be entirely fair -- up until recently, many games had low production budgets, and were less well tested on multiplayer games, and had very simple and difficult-to-counter tactics (or tactics for which the countering prevented anyone from experiencing the larger portion of the game). In general, I agree that a game that allows true "cheesiness" is broken at a design level -- however, it's hard to find a perfect game.
Regarding Soul Calibur II requiring very little skill: Think again. Soul Calibur II was designed to have a more gradual learning curve than most other fighters on purpose to be easy to pick up but don't kid yourself in thinking your "beginner attacks" could in any dreamworld be "more powerful than any advanced player's most complex combo attack". You are way off base. If this is your opinion, I know I could defeat you 63/0 with one hand. Enter a competition to test your theory rather than replying with some anecdotal evidence about your living room experiences.
I agree absolutely. Soul Calibur II has one of the best curves ever. A new player can sit down, pick up a controller, and without much idea what they're doing, do lots of cool-looking moves and do a fair amount of damage. Skill *definitely* makes people better (and you can improve yourself a huge amount, given that a complete mastery of the game involves knowing all of everyone's moves and being able to distinguish between almost all of them instantly), but it takes a lot of skill to make a small difference in gameplay. When combined with the handicap feature, Soul Calibur II can be fun for even fairly new players playing against fairly decent players.
Almost all the unblockables in SC2 are very slow. I doubt you're going to find something that you can reliably repeatedly pull off that's also unblockable.
Your arcade saw fights because somebody *harpooned* someone else with Scorpion?
That's a collection of belligerent drunks or something, not normal people.
If they really only have one thing that they can do better than you, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect you to figure out how to leverage your superior skill in other areas to win?
I'd personally like it if the computer characters had AI that changes personality. Take the beta testers, and use thier styles to shape various AI setups. It'll make the player be more well rounded and fill holes in thier style.
Frequently, game manufacturers have trouble with piracy. The easiest way they have to work around piracy is to convert the game into a "service", so that you miss out on significant functionality if you pirate the game. Half-Life, for instance -- sure, players can pirate the game, but the auth system makes Internet multiplayer (such as Counterstrike) difficult.
Providing a game (especially a fighting game) that has a game engine that transmits player actions back to the developer, who then sends out updated AIs based on learned behavior from what players are doing would provide good, ongoing challenge. Since this is not a realtime activity, it would work nicely over even a cheap ol' IP connection. Use a neural net or something.
When you beat someone with tactics that they are unprepared for and not experienced in countering, they get frusterated and angry.
It happened to the British in the American Revolutionary War -- "hiding behind trees and rocks is unfair and cowardly!".
It happened to the US in Vietnam -- "using ununiformed troops and ability to blend into civilian environments is unfair and cowardly!"
Now it's happening to the US again in the form of bin Laden's tactics -- hit and run, avoiding allowing the enemy to get a good swing at you, attacking vulnerable points.
War is war. It is not a card game. If you want to play a limited strategy game where certain behavior is prohibited and you want to see who wins with such constraints and you have agreed on such behavior, with either technological or social power to enforce these constraints, that's one thing. If someone is playing an FPS, they should by default expect someone not to make the most of the map, the game system, their abilities, and the weaknesses in that player's own playing style.
It is extremely difficult to be "cheesy" in SC2, at least, at anything other than a beginner level. Being predictable is exactly what will get the bajeezus beaten out of you -- once the other person gets your timing down, they will guard-impact you and proceed to beat you senseless.
As for characters that just have combos with a number of hits, like Ivy or Sophitia or Xiang Hua, that's just part of the character's style.
A game that allows a player to be "cheesy" is, IMHO, flawed.
Linux has a lot of good stuff, but Red Hat leaves out some goodies that I like to use (some of these are available in the main third-party repositories):
I used to install yafc (best CLI FTP client out there, with good colorization and, unlike lftp, the ability to interact with local files and pipe things to shell commands), but apparently the maintainer has just decided to stop maintaining it. Ack!
I like to install atool. This is basically an intelligent (text-based) frontend to all the archive-handling tools out there. You just type aunpack <archive-name> and it checks the type and decompresses the archive. If there are multiple files in the root of the archive, it creates a new directory and puts them all in it.
WINE. WINE may not be perfect, but when you want to use a Windows program, you'll be glad that you have it set up.
mplayer. It's the most capable video player out there for Linux, even if some of the more advanced capabilities might be a bit intimidating at first.
Two tools -- one a small C program that I wrote that runs the program and arguments passed it "as a daemon" -- detached from a terminal. This is useful for running something that you want to keep
running in the background without the ability to output crud to the screen. The second is a pair of scripts that provide a version of xargs' functionality, but escape spaces and the like, so that one can use xargs on files with spaces in their names.
Valgrind. Valgrind is a very good memory debugger. Red Hat does not include it in the base distribution because of patent issues (/me hates software patents and the damage they do to the software development area). Exclusion of valgrind is a significant factor in increasing software bugginess. God, I wish the US had EU-style patent law.
Or, they say, 'If we cannot wait, we need SCO to tell us what we are infringing upon with specificity.' Since we know how SCO will answer the second question, and the court likely will too, since they amended the filings from SCO v IBM and SCO v RedHat and SCO v Novell, it seems to me (IANAL) that they should get to wait."
You mean how they'll answer based on the IBM case?
SCO: "Your honor, in order to list the lines with specificity, we need a copy of AutoZone's customer database, of their parts blueprints, and of all source involved with moving away from any SCO products."
Ignoring the parent post just because it's trolling is silly -- it offers a good opportunity to clarify the points involved.
Only clueless fanboys would give a damn about under which license their drivers are distributed. As long as they do what they're supposed, so what?
The kernel developers have a tainting system in place because they won't debug kernels that have drivers loaded that are closed-source. It's too hard for them to tell whether that driver might have been responsible, and very difficult for them to fix any problems.
Try seeing how interested Microsoft is with fixing problems in other people's proprietary drivers. It's not all that high.
This is different from something meaningful, like Microsoft's excellent WHLQ certification. I'm surprised that no other vendor, including LinuxOS Inc., has copied the idea of certified drivers yet. Microsoft has taken the initiative to take responsibility, this is something that the GPG/Linux community needs to copy.
WHQL is primarily a mechanism designed to give Microsoft strategic power in the software market. It has little to do with software quality, though it is billed as such (just as DRM is billed as an anti-virus/malware scheme by MS). It is intended to grant them ultimate authority over what software is released for their system -- they have the power to refuse to sign any driver release if they need to do so as a lever, which gives them tremendous power over device manufacturers. This is tremenously more powerful and intrusive than the Linux driver tainting system, which works on an honor system. WHQL ensures only basic functionality is in place -- WHQL testing does not involve audititing code, checking for corner cases, or do any of the things necessary to produce a good, bug-free driver.
I prefer to develop my modules under the revised BSD license, so that others can port them to the BSDs without running into licensing issues. However, Linux will mark the kernel as tainted when a BSD-licensed module is inserted. So I mark them as Dual GPL/BSD, so that they can be loaded without complaints, although I really don't want to release them under GPL, as that would pose a risk that others add code under GPL that could then not be used in the BSDs.
They could do so anyway. BSD-licensed code can be relicensed to GPL-licensed code.
You know, if there really was a direct parallel here, I imagine it would be something like this.
The RIAA would give away their entire music library for free, *including* the individual samples and source data, with the sole proviso that people not take their samples and include them in music where the sample data is not in turn released.
Then someone ran out and sold a song that swiped RIAA member samples without releasing their own.
That would probably get people on the side of the RIAA, yes.
The actual situation is a little different.
BUT... the linux kernel developers need to get over their fanaticism about open-source drivers.
That's ridiculous. The only thing they're doing is not troubleshooting systems with drivers that they can't have the source to. It makes it incredibly difficult to debug a kernel when there's a driver running with access to the kernel's memory and something is breaking.
Plus, as a user, I'd rather see more pressure for vendors to move to open-source, and this provides that. I derive a good deal of indirect benefit from open-source drivers, and this puts more direct pressure on vendors.
You'd have to read the list for exact details of what's irritating the people specifically, but here's a link.
Basically, Linux and friends (in frusteration at trying to troubleshoot non-open-source drivers, where they can't tell what's going on or fix anything) introduced a "tainting" system. Basically, they refuse to handle bug reports or fix anything on a system that has any "tainted" modules loaded.
This tends to increase direct customer dissatisfaction with closed-source drivers.
Clearly this is a case of needing to revoke the driver's Major Number.
However, there is an matter of the public welfare to consider here. There is no public good that could come of people knowing my dirty secrets, but it is very much in the public's interest for citizens to know exactly what hands we're placing our votes* in.
The thing is, if that's the case then this should explicitly be made all right -- that "documents relating to voting are public, and that this obligation overrides all confidentiality guarantees", for instance.
People who don't understand the issues shouldn't vote on them.
Yes, but aging Bible-thumpers *are* voting. The question is whether they can be counteracted or not.
"Anybody but Bush" is a very, very dangerous path to tread. I'll vote for Kerry if I think I wouldn't mind him as president, but if he pisses me off the way Gore did, a minor party will be getting my vote again.
The problem is that a couple of people taking an ideological stand were what put Bush in the White House in the first place. Nobody wants to see that happen again. Let me be blunt -- the Green Party, the Communist Party, whoever -- they aren't going to get anyone in as the president. This isn't an attempt to keep them from winning -- they just currently don't have enough popular support. We know this from polls, where people don't have any incentive to poll in favor of the Dems or the GOP.
By "voting for someone else", you aren't doing anything particularly ethical. You are simply throwing your vote away. You *know* that this means that you are handing the influence that you could have had over to the masses, which currently slightly favor Bush. You cannot "wash your hands of the mess" by voting Green.
I agree that a revised voting system would be better (starting with removing the electoral college, and next going to a multi-choice system). However, if Green really isn't going to win, you do nobody any good by voting Green.
While I agree with your sentiments...
Diebold screwed up, and they admit it.
It'd be very difficult for them to do anything else at this point.
Trusted computing is M$ FUD.
FUD != BS. FUD is spreading unfounded and vague worries about something. FUD is a very specific subset of BS. Trusted computing as an idea is not only pushed by MS, but by all those random little companies that keep popping up with ideas to control content that don't work. It's a useful tool to extract money from media companies. It (at least in the general purpose computing arena) has little chance of becoming practically usable.
The DMCA was written by technology and entertainment companies to protect a dying business model. Then enacted by a techonlogicaly illiterate Congress.
Mmm...maybe.
There are obviously severe issues with attempting to enforce the DMCA. However, remember that there are severe issues with attempt to enforce copyright offline, as well. When copyright started, you could whip out your printing press and knock off tons of copies. When Mark Twain was working on strengthening copyright internationally, it was common for people to rip off books. The DMCA is an attempt to deal with this in the only remotely practical way -- by preventing people from producing distributing tools designed to bypass copy protection mechanisms. Frankly, I don't think that it will work, and I'm tremendously irritated by the restrictions on what I can do. However, you don't have to be technologically illiterate to back the DMCA -- it codifies probably the most effective way to attack copyright infringement on the Internet. (The question of whether that way is very effective at all is certainly valid.)
In short, none of these groups really know what they are doing.
I disagree.
* Diebold got their money for the voting machines, and is sitting pretty. They know what they're doing.
* MS has gotten interest in their formats (such as wma) as "content protecting", and is using this oomph to go after the electronic music distribution market that Apple currently dominates (and, I would expect, eventually the video market). While they may not succeed, MS has stabbed Apple in the guts before rather nastily, and it's not unreasonable to think that they'll manage to beat Apple again. They know what they're doing.
* The DMCA is a *great* advantage for content provider companies, and pushing it is one of the biggest wins content providers have had for a while. If they move to e-distribution (and away from their current "dying business model"), it will *still* be a powerful club. They know what they're doing.
* Congress got their campaign contributions from the content providing industry. In general, I'd say that they probably know what they're doing. However, enough bad PR has been raised by anti-DMCA activists that a few legislators are working to temper things (such as the legislators that publically opposed the suing of the 14-year-old girl), so perhaps the move was not a good one.
On the whole, only Congress seems to have made a move that might not be in their interests, and that's debatable.
IMHO, ISO 900x is mostly a money game for certification companies, and a political tool used to exclude various companies from doing business in markets. It sounds good; it doesn't mean much.
Darl will never end up in jail over this. CEOs almost *never* go to jail for what their companies do. I was a little hopeful about fraud suits early on, but it looks like that isn't going to happen.
I agree that McBride's screwups have helped things immensely.
You were convinced by MS ot invest in SCO despite them havign no IT Ligation exp in IP lawsuits on the basis of what as theri Unix business is dead?
While Darl and friends really *aren't* the most ept at IP litigation (view the numerous mistakes made), and both Darl and Baystar pretty well qualify as scum (trying to push a set of claims that everyone involved pretty clearly knows is bogus, and en route damaging a project that tens of thousands of very bright people have built with their volunteer time), I doubt that Baystar is *really* thinking that they have a chance if senior management is switched at SCO.
It's not that uncommon to throw the CEO to the wolves (by which I mean "let go with a golden parachute to seek employment elsewhere") when things go sour, whether it's his fault or not.
The claim "focus less on UNIX and more on litigation" is, from what I know, pretty silly. SCO has been doing jack for their UNIX properties already -- Baystar may just be putting up a front of "we knew the right thing to do, SCO was a good investment, but their management screwed it up".
Oh, and as for people who say "they're only in it for the money" WRT Darl and Baystar -- yeah, no kidding. We formed a social and legal system that made money the sole master, where corporate executives are responsible only to shareholders, and only to increasing stock value. There is no provision in our legal system for, say, gross unethical action. Darl and all the MBAs and lawyers involved are doing *exactly* what we've chosen to have society reward them for. It's hard to complain when they do exactly that. If we want them to do something else, we need to make provision for that in law.