The assumption seems to be that you have to switch to entirely separate scores for different parts. That's not so. This is something I've put some thought into, not that I can code it right now, but USE this, anybody who can, gpl it or something. Take an extended musical piece, let's say something as MIDI for the purposes of the example (the idea was designed around MIDI). Set up some chord changes, an entire little score. Then do an extended improvisation or composition. Have it be major-key, and long enough to avoid too much repetitiveness. Now copy it to another track, just duplicate it straight across- then change every major third to a minor third. Boom! Suddenly you have a programmatic switch between two almost-identical scores, where at any point you can subtly shift the mood according to what's happening on the screen at that second. It's not a grand score change, it's imperceptible, but serves as a subtle cue that something ominous is going on. The solo turns foreboding, and you turn to look and WHAM!;) Then add drums and bass, in a relaxed groove. Fine- now record them again, busy and violent. Then for kicks record a drum track that's all fills. Now you have another level- an activity monitor. If the game picks up, the groove picks up as well, and if things happen suddenly you can hit a drum fill at any point (if desired, doubled with bass). Now add some synth pads- let's say the game is like Joust or something, where you might be going up or going down or staying at a level. If the player is going up, up_pad is on: if the player's going down, down_pad is on: otherwise they are muted. Your result is a completely fluid piece of composition in which the dynamic nature of it was also human-composed. Every game will be different, and the score tracks the activity so closely that it might be a sound effects track, but it does it in a completely fluid manner. You could easily have other lead voices to accompany different monsters or prizes- the whole score is so completely dynamic that there is no such thing as 'the score', it's completely a product of how you play the game and is never quite the same. Computer involvement is a tool not a replacement for human input... in fact the example I've given could be implemented with current technology while using entirely human-performed musical tracks.
You are perfectly right that if nobody wishes to take these ports/manglings public, they're free and clear. You're totally wrong about internal use- there is no concept of internal or external in the GPL, nor is there any concept of boss or subordinate. It concerns itself entirely with legal entities, as in people, and _pointedly_ avoids any further distinctions. As such, if everybody at Microsoft wants to pass binaries and source around among each other (or binaries and make source available if requested), they're golden, they can do that forever, entirely compliant with the GPL. BUT! ANY INDIVIDUAL who has the binary or source has full rights to distribute it anywhere he or she likes, warez groups, the front page of Slashdot, sky's the limit! EVERY single person working with or using such tools has the full unrestricted privileges under the GPL, explicitly spelled out as equivalent to anybody else. Their employment is irrelevant and does not enter into the contract at all- the license agreement specifically authorises EVERY ONE of them as a legitimate redistributor free to redistribute any way they see fit compliant only to the constraints of the GPL. Any restrictions that curtail these rights are not compatible with the GPL and are not tolerated- if you can't work with the GPL as written it's not allowed to work with it at all. If you are not being allowed to share your source with the outside world if _YOU_ so desire, then you're not allowed to work with the source at all... So, there are two possibilities. Either ANY of the people working on such a project are entitled to share it with us outside world people anytime they feel like it (and if they don't _want_ to that's OK too, but no coercion!), or they are violating the part of the contract stating that the GPL is incompatible with other outside restrictions being put on. There's no two ways about it. So, then... Microsofties, which is it? Do you feel like filling us in on what's happening to any GPLed source you might be working with? It's your privilege to decline, but if you feel like sharing, not only will you be doing a nice thing for us, you'll be proving to the world that Microsoft is not violating the GPL by illegally and against the requirements of the license agreement restricting you from exercising the rights granted you under the GPL >:) So how about it? Are you being allowed to obey the requirements of the legally binding license agreement, or are you being forced to break the law by threats of punitive action? >:)
First: who is willing to establish an organisation that does nothing but reads open source code, good bad or indifferent (if there is objection to it, then a particular sort like GPLed code could be targetted), and writes the ideas and concepts covered in the code in as many ways as possible, publishing the resulting long lists of ideas and algorithms on newsprint and CD-rom? This serves two purposes- one, the CD-rom can be text-searched by the patent office (it would be a valuable service to them), and two, the newsprint copy can be notarized and stored somewhere as legal evidence. I publicize my own patentable ideas as best I can, but there's the question of proof. I really can't afford the materials or time to write a newsletter, have it notarized and stored, but somebody must begin doing this to accumulate hard evidence on prior art, and the time to start doing it is now. Who is willing? I can't do it but I would pay for it- if necessary I would budget this above food, because it's about my future.
Second: I see a lot of yammering about the legal forces involved here, but very little consideration of the public relations angle. We are behaving like we have to fight this using legal means which are denied to us. Instead, there's a lot of history to look at, precedent to consider, that suggests that the best thing that could possibly happen to us is for a well known coder to get nailed for infringement, be a scofflaw ("I invented this and I'm going to keep using it and sharing it with others"), and get sent to jail for contempt. That would be a martyr. Can you picture the public reaction?
"This is Dan Rather, and I'm speaking through these bars to Chris Johnson. Mr. Johnson, why are you in prison?" "I wrote a video game, Dan." "You wrote a video game. And did you attack somebody with this video game? Was it a violent video game, or have obscene content?" "No. It's chess." "Chess is a video game?" "I wrote a video game that lets you play chess on a computer. Microsoft has patented playing chess on computers, and threatened to put me in jail if I didn't destroy my program, which I wrote two years before their patent was made. I refused, and, well, here I am." "How do you feel about being put in jail for writing a chess game on the computer?" "It's pretty weird. I'm also not allowed to use any computers for ten years..." "So you don't do anything dangerous, like write a checkers game on the computer?" "Yeah, that's it. But all the other prisoners only get to use Windows machines anyway, so I'm not missing much." "This is Dan Rather from San Quentin Prison, reporting on the fate of a man jailed for writing a chess game on his computer. Although this may seem like a rare and strange occurrence, you may be the next victim- here at NBS, we've just spent a hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars replacing our video editing software for the same reason. We had people writing software for us, and they were sued. The difference between freedom and this jail cell for our employees totals a hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars- the irony is, the software we're enjoined from using, worked. What we've purchased, does not, and if you see peculiar flashing lines or freezes in the video, a lack of synchronization between voice and image, take a moment to consider the price tag, because we sure do. This is Dan Rather signing off."
One fellow ("ntsucks") said, "Either Intel has a stunning ability to improve its engineering process and timelines or they were withholding better chips until we had all purchase their current chip du jour"... To which I would have to add, "...or they are talking absolute crap".
:)
Come on, people, get real. You're being manipulated. It's crazy to take some company's random promises as accomplished facts. You sure wouldn't do it for Apple, why pretend that Intel has a crystal ball? The intelligence you're insulting is strictly your own, 'cause other people are reading your comments and going "uh-HUH. Riiiiight. Aren't people credulous? Damn." Seriously. Take a few deep breaths.
Nonsense. They are, as every chip manufacturer is, pushing as hard as they possibly can to advance the state of the art. If a G4 stomps all over a PIII in certain applications, it does not mean that Intel has secret PIIIIs or PIIIIIIIs sitting in dark closets waiting to produce, it means that Intel is no longer producing the highest performance chips. What with the Athlon work being done, it is possible that Intel is now the weakest of major chip manufacturers now that Cyrixes and WinChips aren't exactly a factor. Not only could they not 'release this processor at any time', they still haven't released it, and there is every reason to believe they will not release it in the manner they suggest either. It will take longer or be slower. They don't have stuff waiting offstage- this is _the_ premier 'paranoid corporation', the last one in the world that would be sitting around going "Ho hum, we got this chip here, seems to go real fast. Maybe we should make some of them and sell them, or gosh, why don't we just ignore the competition and tack it up on the wall for a while instead? It's real purty-like." Uh-uh. Sorry. There is no Intel Fairy. That mystical creature seems to be hanging around Motorola, nVidia and AMD these days...
I can't tell you how interesting and inspiring it is to see the above post. I'm an extremist, myself- on Linux I gravitate towards the approach Tom prefers, with digressions for things like trying out piles of GNOME apps to see what that's like (tried KDE, didn't like the 'winix' feel of the apps). However, when my Dr. Jekyll side takes over, Winix or for that matter Windows itself is pathetically inadequate, and I boot into MacOS day in and day out, running a set of habitual stable programs and not being bothered with inconsistencies on the scale of a Windows or Winix. So in some senses I would have to consider myself so much of a GUI purist that, again, Windows is pathetically inadequate, and Winix only gets by because it's too primitive to offer the full morass of Windows-like GUI crud! Most of your basic GUI functionality was present in MacOS before even System Six- there have been some very important refinements, particularly in defining semantics for drag and drop of various different datatypes between apps and in window zooming logic (which wasn't really perfected until System 7 and 8), but on the whole the essence of GUI is in offering a _simple_ and physically direct interface. Mere pictures are not enough- the ridiculous toolbarness of Windows and Winix is every bit as arcane as the most strangely-named Unix commands, only with pictures. It takes a lot of selfdiscipline to keep a GUI approachable and learnable- something that Windows disdains to do, and something that Winix/X in general never considered doing (for example, consider the classic X text handling mousebutton boondoggle! It entirely replaces direct manipulation with an emphasis on weird specialised controls, presumably so the mousehandling code will be simpler). What is the alternative? It is what Tom is talking about. It's not elitist- but it is very different. Consider a user interface where operations are no longer behaviors of 'app' objects lying around like Swiss Army Knives- instead they are like words that must be formed into sentences, new sentences for every need, an 'interface' that must be learned but is then used unthinkingly for years. I had to zap several lines of many HTML files the other day. My boss, with great effort and inconvenience, managed to fix the lines in one file and upload it by FTP to the website, using Windows tools. This involved a great deal of GUI manipulation. Using Winix tools would have required a comparable amount of clicking and manipulating (assuming a remote client), as it was inherent in the approach. I tired of watching him and said, 'Give me a terminal', and took over, doing all the rest of the files in vi on the webhosting machine itself, remotely via terminal, with the following commands: vi *foo.html, (arrowkeys), dd, dd, dd, dd, dd, ZZ. Lather, rinse, repeat- I could have been faster if I wanted to rush. Yet I'd had to learn, earlier, that vi had 'modes', what 'dd' and 'ZZ' meant, and how to run vi on a text file. If I was still more literate, the nature of the exact problem that faced me was a natural for a recursive line-deleting script, in that the deleted lines were always identical. If I spoke Unix even more fluently, the image is of me looking at one of the files, copying some text or making note of the lines to be deleted, and then effortlessly writing about two lines of bafflingly cryptic line noise script (if that!), hitting return, and just walking away. Done. Done all the same even if it was thousands of files to correct, because I had the power to identify common factors among the work to be done, and Unix had the power to let me address only the exact tasks that had to be performed, and to build a 'sentence' that was the Unix translation of "See those lines? Go through all the files and delete them when you see them." I didn't have quite that power. I vied with all the files individually, hampered by the terminal's inability to do tab filename completion (sorely missed), and still each task took easy seconds, not in spite of the lack of a GUI, but because there were no actions to perform that did not directly relate to what I was doing, and because the few vi commands I had committed to memory (just by use, nothing more) happened to perfectly suit the tasks I had to perform. If Linux becomes completely synonymous with KDE and Gnome, it will be cheating itself of some incredible potentialities- yet it cannot ever completely lose this. Anyone can fire up six different kinds of term (even if many people's goal is to never have to use one!) and all of this is latent, waiting to be used. More relevantly, the mere existence of KDE and Gnome does not mean that nobody is thinking about how to best maximize the classic potential of Unix, but combine it with the eye candy of modern window managers. I know I have a whiteboard right now filled with brainstorming on how to combine an eyecandy window manager with a powerful emphasis on term windows and methods of manipulating them and handling them. I'm talking not a GUI in which you can run terms, but a windowing environment centrally focussed on certain possibilities inherent in the concept of fixed-character-dimensions terms and use of a mouse to manage window positioning and launch icon-resident processes (and I'm thinking one button mouse with rightclicking being the extra value, rather than two-button or three-button as compulsory to be able to do anything). It's not ready yet. I'm still working on it and in fact I need some window manager behaviors that I'll have to learn to program, because nothing, not even E, does quite what I'm thinking of. But it's coming, because regardless of current fashion there IS another way of doing things, and the way to make it approachable is not to put buttons on everything, but to think out and design the concepts so that they make sense when used as language. Once people start using language-style interfaces, they never let go...
"sure MS users can view it, but with the proliferation of set-top-boxes et. al that don't use IE, MS will be forced to comply to the standards..." Certainly not. In the situation of a proprietary MS web, only the set top boxes produced by MS proliferate, and in some cases the most common authoring software might well be tweaked to produce code that intentionally fails to work on whatever set-top boxes aren't made by MS, unless the vendors license proprietary IE code at extortionate prices from MS. I'm surprised you missed that, it's the most obvious thing in the world. We are already about 80% of the way towards that proprietary MS web, it's just that what with the DoJ case and Netscape only recently having died and AOL not being dead enough yet, MS doesn't choose to start turning the screws just yet. The time to start changing everything to really punish anything non-MS and render it useless is about a year and a half from now assuming their plans continue effectively. Until that time it is not in their best interest to put on the pressure. It's like hunting and chasing something- they have to let the rest of the computer industry run until it is tired before they catch up to it and snap its collective neck. Closing with it too early is overly chancy, and not the behavior of a smart predator, and MS may be a dreadfully sloppy software developer but they are a very smart predator and always have been, in the sense that Sweeney Todd may have been a terrible barber but was a very effective murderer.
Patents are _already_ impossible to 'broke individuals' regardless of their capacity to innovate. Therefore the fine idea is pointless, as patents are already a completely un-level playing field that is used only as a way to suppress innovation and ensure that only large corporations can be allowed to own intellectual property. If I have an idea, I have three choices:
Sit on it until a big corp matches it and enjoins me from using it ever again
Use it and risk being taken to court when the big corp figures out it can win purely because it can challenge my right to the idea, and I can't pay to fight it
GPL the bugger, whereupon it's very unlikely that I personally can profit from the idea in the usual sense, but on the other hand it's very likely that the idea can't be taken away from me, ever, and _that_ might be worth something to me, independent of my desire to not let the corp own it.
Cellular is a fairly unimportant little cellular automata program. Staccato is a reminder program, which might have some ideas relating to intelligent input parsing somebody is trying to patent. It sets things up so entries in the info file are very easily done, with the 'API' extremely easy to master. I'm sure someone would try to patent that. Sitebot is a particular method of keeping data files as plain text with a couple of easily added headers, and 'compiling' that into a website which can then be uploaded. If anybody means to patent a narrowly defined method for writing plaintext and having it read and turned into a web site with the same structure as the plaintext files and folders, Sitebot is prior art. ROTSOS (Return of the Son of Spacewar) is the best yet, being a radically different approach to game engine design. It offers literally the ability to produce game 'maps' equivalent to data files billions of gigs in size, in fact the ability to have billions of worlds each with 'maps' (not all of which will be distinct, but for all practical purposes...). It requires that game map creation be an exploratory process rather than a creative process, a major innovation in map design IMHO as the person who came up with it after reading lots of stuff on AI and artificial life. Took some years to work out, and naturally I've had to produce flashy demos (mostly movies, others to come) to illustrate what's being done here.
What do all these software products have in common, from the trivial to the actually innovative? They are _all_ Free Software under the GNU GPL. That is including ROTSOS, and I have every expectation that somebody else with ship a GPLed game before I can get one together. I understand that and approve of it. I also understand that I'm going to stay poor and won't get diddly from all this.
Then why on earth am I doing it? Because I'm just another soldier in a different sort of war. This patent stuff is deadly serious, but it's not fought with guns (unless they are patentable;) ). It's fought with ideas, and sacrifices have to be made. If intellectual property is not to be become a ball and chain, if people are to retain the ability to work with their minds and retain control over their own ideas and clever inventions, it seems the only safe haven anymore is the hardcore free (libre) software side- the determination to produce ideas and add them to the shared hoard. If these ideas are in use and known to be in existence, matching ideas cannot be patented. If the ideas are unsung and never seen by anybody, then lawyers will have a relatively easy time raising doubt that a matching idea came first. Publicity is the friend of free software, the handmaiden of 'prior art'.
So.... STEAL MY SOFTWARE!!!! That's right- go grovel through its ugly depths for any ideas that might make your open source project take off! Grab anything you want! Be grateful or not, say nice things about what neat ideas I have or not- the only requirement is that it stay GPL. Take all the credit for stuff that I came up with, while releasing it as GPL! Because as long as somebody gets publicity for a GPLed idea or algorithm or program, as long as that idea is obviously prior art and not ripe for a patent, that means I get to keep using it. And if the ideas languish in obscurity, it's all the more likely that some clown will patent some broad notion, hire better lawyers and enjoin me from ever using the idea that was mine in the first place. I'm not kidding. Wittingly or not, this is war now.
Write GPLed software (that being the most hardcore of the licenses)! Get glaring publicity! Anybody who can, _please_ make sure as many ideas (broad or specific) are within the camp of 'free software, prior art' as possible. Because it's a real problem, a serious danger, and these people trying to fight it by staking out defensive patents are only compounding the problem.
The trouble is this: a random selection of people has no particular qualifications for wisdom or knowledge. Unless you are ready to postulate a self-selecting superior race of Slashdot ACs^Hreaders;) you run into the difficulty that the peers reviewing your idea have no clue about it. Peer review is not a populist thing, but an elitist one- you don't peer review scientific papers by handing them out in the street. In the case of the Jane's piece, there clearly were qualified peers available to review the work. In many other cases there wouldn't be- and Slashdot is not a selective forum, for the most part. In fact, the nature of Slashdot is such that it is almost impossible for certain notions, such as unionization, to get reviewed with clarity, because the Slashdot population has self-selected to strongly favor libertarian beliefs, and beyond that to outright Randite views. This slant even manages to strongly color more computer-software-oriented socialist ideas, such as freedom of software being an end in itself and not solely a tool used to maximize profit. As a result, one is almost obligated to say 'OF COURSE open source is about maximizing efficiency and profit and anything else is icing on the cake', and it's equally obligatory for _somebody_ to slam the GPL's more social implications when that is brought into the discussion, as if to say, "You can talk all you want but you HAVE TO also pay credence to the TRUTH!". All this merely underlines the point that Slashdot is its own special interest group, with no particular claim on the truth. Considered as a whole, Slashdot may have formidable resources to peer review some things. It may be clueless about other things, or even actively wrong and misguided about still other things, even things that seem to concern it deeply. My picture of the average Slashdot viewpoint (not reader, just viewpoint) is of a viewpoint deeply educated in computer technology, naive in sociology, rather well-off and insulated from the harsher edge of modern society, similarly naive in politics and economics, with a strikingly optimistic viewpoint and lots of energy to bring great things to the world, but extremely willing to write off injustices and abuses as acceptable provided the abuser is acting in their own self interest, which is seen as so paramount that it is not ever to be questioned. As a result, the vision of the average Slashdot viewpoint (not reader, viewpoint) is very sharp but very narrow, prone to fixate on small details and fail to acknowledge there is a big picture- capable of spying a dim possibility on the horizon, _pursuing_ it and then actually _reaching_ that possibility where most people would never ever have got that far- and then looking around in complete surprise at the surroundings, having never given a thought to what else was there. Thoughts?
It is not _instantly_ recognizable as Markov-chain travesty (which is the process by which this travesty was generated, Markov chaining- I have a twisted little story edited from Markov chained output, called Speak Roughly To Your Evidence) Instead, this Katz travesty requires a moment of actual reading to discover that its incoherency and sloppiness is not Katz's usual sort, but far worse and more random. That's kind of scary:) normal writers can be instantly distinguished from travesty. Katz already shows some behavior that is similar to travesty, for instance the surprising fact that the first and third lines of his story start with the exact same six words and punctuation, and the second line is a sentence fragment. What is Katz, really? This travesty and the disturbing realisation that it shares more with the original source than one would expect raises some unusual questions. Katz _is_ a living human being, unless Rob Malda is playing some really, really weird mind game with us- so what is happening with these very Markov-like writing habits? Is this a suggestion that the human thought processes draw more from Markov chaining than we'd like to admit- and that clarity and coherency are derived from a sort of 'overseer' level in the brain that looks at the entire work as a whole, and censors redundancies and incompleted thoughts- a 'censor' level that in Jon Katz is not working effectively?
Legal? Yes, absolutely. I wouldn't argue with that a bit, and I'm sure there's some legal bits requiring that officers maximize stock value at all costs.
Moral? *rofl* Nonsense! This silly notion has justified so many repugnant outrages, from the Nestle baby formula, to the same jerky behavior that routinely gets Apple raked over the coals on Slashdot, to most things Microsoft has ever done worth being outraged about. There are no moral rules written into corporate law. If you think that working for a corporation automatically gives you the obligation to ignore your own morality and that of the world at large, and extort, abuse, lie, and harm in the name of being good to the corporation, then please don't ever work for a corporation, OK?
Er, you are talking about the people who have produced actual quotes such as "What we want is a reasonable share of the market. What is a reasonable share? 100% seems reasonable". They're not fooling. Why don't you see this?
That is EXACTLY the point. FedEx, UPS, etcetera, are free to say, "We don't deliver to such-and-such areas," or "we charge a 2000 percent surcharge to anyone not living within twenty miles of a major city." And they will, and they especially will if you hao other options. I recently had a FedEx guy refuse to _climb_ _stairs_ to knock on my door- to him, if my (useless) doorbell wasn't working, I didn't deserve 'express package delivery'. (Bugger was carrying my O'Reilly books too!) The price is almost irrelevant. The real issue is that if it was a private corporation, they would instantly disenfranchise anybody living in that shack at the top of a mountain- thus getting the lower price. Well, other countries may feel differently (socialist ones may actually understand this even better than we do!) but the USA was founded on the concept that _everyone_ counts, and that the government looks after everybody's interests, as best it can- very likely unimpressively, but you have to give it points just for being willing to try. The mail system is a perfect example- it is in fact pretty competitive on price with the private corporations (though you can pay extra to a private corporation whose representative then refuses to bother to knock on your door and squanders the time savings you thought you were buying), but the real issue is what the private corporations will refuse to do because it's a money sink- who they'll put the screws to in order to make better offers to the majority. Damn right it's socialist thinking. This nation was founded on little carefully chosen bits of socialist thinking. It's a problem when that is lightly brushed aside. Why yes, let's disband the post office! Hell, let's disband the judicial system, and law enforcement, and people can take their gripes and concerns, for instance about fraud practiced by big corporations, or negligence resulting in loss of life, to efficient for-pay courts paid for by the mysteriously immune-from-guilt defendants! Then they can be informed of the loss of their suit through a for-pay mail system that refuses to deliver to an address that won't co-pay (or something- now wouldn't that be profitable: pay to get your mail!). Most efficiently of all, we could have the for-pay law enforcement take notice of these miserable plebian worthless drags on the country, and go out and shoot them in the head, whereby the whole nation can be made to run more efficiently and profitably!
If anybody thinks that isn't sarcasm, go see a doctor...
Sure. The engine is not the game. The engine is also not necessarily the cheat. I'm personally developing some enginelike stuff as GPLed free software: currently it's some terrain generation and universe generation code and ideas. (end plug;) ) As far as open source gaming is concerned, there are some things becoming apparent. The actual direction of a game has to be 'steered': I've seen projects that worked and projects that tanked and the difference is leadership and the willingness to say 'No, your idea is rejected', particularly in the realm of artistic decisions. If you go with pure committee-like democratic rule, you lose: someone has to be the hatchetman, and you have to pick people capable of fulfulling their roles. Given that, the question is kind of like 'if you can get the source to Apache and hack it, doesn't that make all Apache web sites insecure dead meat?'. Certainly not- it's a question of what sort of API you let a client use to communicate with a server. Ideally you work things out very carefully, and also make _no_ allowance for anybody to 'adjust' the game, not even the game authors. With a hidden API for adjusting player parameters, you're toast- in fact any critical data that you store on the client is toast, somebody will hack it even if it has to be done by hex editing. So the concepts that are important are keeping vital data on the server, and implementing no way of adjusting this data except by the normal playing of the game. Basically, if you the game developer can do it then somebody else can, with sufficient determination, even if that would mean getting physical access to the machine, social engineering etc, bribery or whatever. This does require that the game mechanics be really thoroughly worked out in advance, particularly areas that could be abused.
So the bottom line is that Microsoft wrote that report itself? _Very_ cute. Even cuter that Microsoft in addition to writing the report funded that bit of Gartner to host it. yaaaaah! fnord!
Yikes! Is it me? I read the bit about an addition to HTTP (thinking "hey hey HEY WHOA run that by me again please?"), and I was wondering exactly how incompatible this would be with existing Web software (does this relate to the client at all? All those old netscapes out there, made useless?) and then it hit me... Isn't the gag that you're supposed to not drop the soap in the showers because of what would happen to you when you bend over to "pick up the SOAP"? Is that an accident or are these guys really that cynical? Are they actually considering 'secondary' embrace and extend effects to existing stuff like HTTP to be primary, is the primary agenda here to, you know? "Wups! Looks like it might be a good idea for you to PICK UP THE SOAP!" *plook* Certainly that's what they are trying to do to the government and DoJ funding, but are they really thinking like this at all levels, so much that it colors their product names and makes anal rape their personal metaphor for the embrace and extend planning? Why are they not being more careful about this potential public relations disaster?
Painful though it can be... I play too many instruments- any music worth a damn tends to make me sing/drum/play along with it or at least _think_ it so powerfully that there's no way I can code. Oddly enough, I have found a sound I can code to, it's just a disturbing sound. Occasionally I will listen to the satellites just beyond the 30-meter shortwave band. It's a roaring electronic noise with rumble and an alien electronic twitter overlaid on it, and will happily continue for hours without a break like an 'environments' record. The fact that it is really abrasive bothers me not at all:) actually, thinking about it makes me want to put on that 'station'! Also, listening to shortwave stations in languages I don't understand is another coding-positive sound environment. Usually it's just silence though, which is why I have a tough time working when it's not very late at night. I need _real_ silence, not random peoplenoise from outside:P
Sorry: like I said, other people can cover their own concerns. There are too many valid concerns for one person to deal with, and I do not agree that Microsoft should be allowed to use its money and lobbying power and pet senator to shut off entire branches of government it does not like. Do you see Cowpland and Corel trying to get the government to turn off insider trading regulations?
Feel free to moderate this down too if you want, but exactly why is the idea "total pragmatism does not define ethical, ethical is the consideration of broader social concerns", 'overrated'? I'm aware that's just a single moderator's opinion, but somebody must have felt very strongly about it to bother using a point on it. What is the deal and does that indicate a conscious decision to render social concerns irrelevant?
The government has seen whores before, so this Washington senator shouldn't get too far. Besides, it's just another case of Microsoft believing that, and behaving like, they outrank the government, the law, and the American people. We've seen all this before. Hell, at one point it was the President acting like this! (Read up on Watergate!) It just doesn't fly, the Senate and the House of Representatives are there for a reason. It's like a jury- the idea is, if there is anybody who cannot tolerate the 'tyranny of the majority', they get a veto and then the country has to muddle through with a compromise to look after the best interests of _all_ the people, not just those with the loudest voices. In this case, I know there are a couple senators etc. who aren't whores for _this_ special interest, and I personally am quite happy to vote a straight don't-let-corporate-monopolies-wreck-the-tech-sect or ticket, and totally ignore anything else including party lines to do so, and let other people take care of the other valid concerns of politics. Indeed, I'm almost _forced_ to because of how much money is being spent corrupting the government and my representatives. I'm a vermonter, and I think Bernie Sanders is sound, but I have concerns that Jeffords is getting corrupted. At any rate, I'm definitely going to be a one-issue voter currently- everything else falls by the wayside compared to the destruction of the economy and the country by tech trusts. That's my privilege, and if it stops being such a threat I can think of other issues and pay attention to them a bit more.
It's perfectly valid to object to Windows NT on the basis of the consequences of such support. Taking a stance of complete moral neutrality and blindness is not necessarily wrong (you have to pick your fights, and leave some other ones alone for people who are more interested or committed), but I disagree that it is in any way ethical. I would say this decision of Carmack's was courageous, gutsy, but not in the slightest ethical. He could have chosen to base the decision on ethical grounds, at which point endorsing Microsoft products may not have seemed like the winning move. Instead he decided to go with total pragmatism based on the current snapshot of the industry, and when it changes he'll re-evaluate. On the one hand I believe and respect that, on the other he has personally taken action to impede its changing- Carmack endorsing NT at the current moment _is_ valuable to MS, make no mistake, and that value and advantage will be spun and used as a weapon whether he meant it that way or not. So it's not really about whether Carmack can identify the optimal platform for his needs at the moment- if that's all it was, then NT could always be that platform, thanks to MS sabotage and buyouts if necessary. The question is whether that alone is enough, and that's a personal question that everybody must answer for themselves. I know that for myself, I've already thought about this question a lot (obviously, since I'm a Mac/LinuxPPC user), and my answer is that I'm ready to be inconvenienced in some ways in order to get other conveniences, and in order to feel like I have options in the industry. If I chose to endorse Microsoft products, that would mean that I had intentionally changed my mind and decided that it was best to encourage a situation where only one vendor won, and everything else was basically crushed, because that's what Microsoft does. Currently I'm not ready to 'endorse' that, and for me these concerns are inextricably bound up with the more pragmatic concerns: for this reason I was completely unmoved by Carmack's perspective. I'd considered that already, and it lost to 'broader social concerns' or however you want to phrase it. I hope other slashdotters are able to take this in the proper context. There seems to be a sense of 'Carmack says NT, therefore everybody should use that until Linux is better', and I don't consider that a sensible position.
I don't know about Windows and would question whether there's much that really hits the professional level like certain Mac stuff, but on the Mac think Digidesign Pro Tools, which also implies specialised hardware. Ensoniq has a digital audio workstation package for several grand called Paris- as usual for this sort of thing, it comes with an outboard patchbay/mixing console. Expect to pay thousands for this stuff. As for the _software_ specifically, again, look at Pro Tools. It's possible that you might go with a GIMP-like 'zillion add-ons' scenario, but there are certain things that must be there, and without them you're nowhere professionally but with them platform means nothing to a DAW:
internal calculations at vastly higher bit depth than your output bit depth (which will be 16 or 24 bit- internal needs to be 32 or 64 or more)
seriously great dithering to translate the final output to the desired bit depth, otherwise the added depth is wasted
realtime. This is where the Mac shines, as you can starve the OS of cycles with trivial ease. To be professional there must _never_ be a dropout of even one sample in duration. To produce pro-quality DAW software, first work out how to make it realtime, even if you don't think it's necessary. You _have_ to treat it as necessary because eventually something will get tangled up and unless you have it running as realtime priority, able to starve _anything_ in the machine to play continuously, you'll get a hiccup- and have to do it over- at twenty thousand dollars an hour (not unreasonable for the total cost of having a superstar group in a really topflight recording studio).
That said, there's no reason why Linux couldn't seize this market, given a suitable understanding of its requirements. However, it's important to not make the mistake the GIMP made- to the best of my knowledge, the GIMP calculates internally in RGB color. (If it calculates internally in 128-bit RGB color, downplay this critique, but gamut is still an issue). Its pro-tool competition, Photoshop, calculates internally in LAB color, which exceeds the gamut of RGB color, and this causes every single operation it offers to be done with a broader palette of colors (not necessarily higher resolution! But a broader gamut). As far as I know, there _are_ no other pixel editing tools that calculate in LAB (Luminance, A and B) color, so the GIMP can basically beat everything else, but this core design decision is limiting. A comparable digital audio opensource project would be well advised to overdesign from the start. On the bright side, there's nothing quite the same as the gamut problem in digital audio, so the main thing would be to calculate in a high enough bit depth and make sure there are never dropouts or error-corrections- given that, future amazing dithering algorithms could be done as plugins, and the project could rival or beat anything commercial:)
Slashdot Mirror
The assumption seems to be that you have to switch to entirely separate scores for different parts. That's not so. This is something I've put some thought into, not that I can code it right now, but USE this, anybody who can, gpl it or something. ;)
Take an extended musical piece, let's say something as MIDI for the purposes of the example (the idea was designed around MIDI). Set up some chord changes, an entire little score. Then do an extended improvisation or composition. Have it be major-key, and long enough to avoid too much repetitiveness.
Now copy it to another track, just duplicate it straight across- then change every major third to a minor third. Boom! Suddenly you have a programmatic switch between two almost-identical scores, where at any point you can subtly shift the mood according to what's happening on the screen at that second. It's not a grand score change, it's imperceptible, but serves as a subtle cue that something ominous is going on. The solo turns foreboding, and you turn to look and WHAM!
Then add drums and bass, in a relaxed groove. Fine- now record them again, busy and violent. Then for kicks record a drum track that's all fills. Now you have another level- an activity monitor. If the game picks up, the groove picks up as well, and if things happen suddenly you can hit a drum fill at any point (if desired, doubled with bass).
Now add some synth pads- let's say the game is like Joust or something, where you might be going up or going down or staying at a level. If the player is going up, up_pad is on: if the player's going down, down_pad is on: otherwise they are muted.
Your result is a completely fluid piece of composition in which the dynamic nature of it was also human-composed. Every game will be different, and the score tracks the activity so closely that it might be a sound effects track, but it does it in a completely fluid manner. You could easily have other lead voices to accompany different monsters or prizes- the whole score is so completely dynamic that there is no such thing as 'the score', it's completely a product of how you play the game and is never quite the same.
Computer involvement is a tool not a replacement for human input... in fact the example I've given could be implemented with current technology while using entirely human-performed musical tracks.
You are perfectly right that if nobody wishes to take these ports/manglings public, they're free and clear.
You're totally wrong about internal use- there is no concept of internal or external in the GPL, nor is there any concept of boss or subordinate. It concerns itself entirely with legal entities, as in people, and _pointedly_ avoids any further distinctions.
As such, if everybody at Microsoft wants to pass binaries and source around among each other (or binaries and make source available if requested), they're golden, they can do that forever, entirely compliant with the GPL.
BUT!
ANY INDIVIDUAL who has the binary or source has full rights to distribute it anywhere he or she likes, warez groups, the front page of Slashdot, sky's the limit! EVERY single person working with or using such tools has the full unrestricted privileges under the GPL, explicitly spelled out as equivalent to anybody else. Their employment is irrelevant and does not enter into the contract at all- the license agreement specifically authorises EVERY ONE of them as a legitimate redistributor free to redistribute any way they see fit compliant only to the constraints of the GPL.
Any restrictions that curtail these rights are not compatible with the GPL and are not tolerated- if you can't work with the GPL as written it's not allowed to work with it at all. If you are not being allowed to share your source with the outside world if _YOU_ so desire, then you're not allowed to work with the source at all...
So, there are two possibilities. Either ANY of the people working on such a project are entitled to share it with us outside world people anytime they feel like it (and if they don't _want_ to that's OK too, but no coercion!), or they are violating the part of the contract stating that the GPL is incompatible with other outside restrictions being put on. There's no two ways about it.
So, then... Microsofties, which is it? Do you feel like filling us in on what's happening to any GPLed source you might be working with? It's your privilege to decline, but if you feel like sharing, not only will you be doing a nice thing for us, you'll be proving to the world that Microsoft is not violating the GPL by illegally and against the requirements of the license agreement restricting you from exercising the rights granted you under the GPL >:)
So how about it? Are you being allowed to obey the requirements of the legally binding license agreement, or are you being forced to break the law by threats of punitive action? >:)
- First: who is willing to establish an organisation that does nothing but reads open source code, good bad or indifferent (if there is objection to it, then a particular sort like GPLed code could be targetted), and writes the ideas and concepts covered in the code in as many ways as possible, publishing the resulting long lists of ideas and algorithms on newsprint and CD-rom? This serves two purposes- one, the CD-rom can be text-searched by the patent office (it would be a valuable service to them), and two, the newsprint copy can be notarized and stored somewhere as legal evidence. I publicize my own patentable ideas as best I can, but there's the question of proof. I really can't afford the materials or time to write a newsletter, have it notarized and stored, but somebody must begin doing this to accumulate hard evidence on prior art, and the time to start doing it is now. Who is willing? I can't do it but I would pay for it- if necessary I would budget this above food, because it's about my future.
- Second: I see a lot of yammering about the legal forces involved here, but very little consideration of the public relations angle. We are behaving like we have to fight this using legal means which are denied to us. Instead, there's a lot of history to look at, precedent to consider, that suggests that the best thing that could possibly happen to us is for a well known coder to get nailed for infringement, be a scofflaw ("I invented this and I'm going to keep using it and sharing it with others"), and get sent to jail for contempt. That would be a martyr. Can you picture the public reaction?
"This is Dan Rather, and I'm speaking through these bars to Chris Johnson. Mr. Johnson, why are you in prison?""I wrote a video game, Dan."
"You wrote a video game. And did you attack somebody with this video game? Was it a violent video game, or have obscene content?"
"No. It's chess."
"Chess is a video game?"
"I wrote a video game that lets you play chess on a computer. Microsoft has patented playing chess on computers, and threatened to put me in jail if I didn't destroy my program, which I wrote two years before their patent was made. I refused, and, well, here I am."
"How do you feel about being put in jail for writing a chess game on the computer?"
"It's pretty weird. I'm also not allowed to use any computers for ten years..."
"So you don't do anything dangerous, like write a checkers game on the computer?"
"Yeah, that's it. But all the other prisoners only get to use Windows machines anyway, so I'm not missing much."
"This is Dan Rather from San Quentin Prison, reporting on the fate of a man jailed for writing a chess game on his computer. Although this may seem like a rare and strange occurrence, you may be the next victim- here at NBS, we've just spent a hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars replacing our video editing software for the same reason. We had people writing software for us, and they were sued. The difference between freedom and this jail cell for our employees totals a hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars- the irony is, the software we're enjoined from using, worked. What we've purchased, does not, and if you see peculiar flashing lines or freezes in the video, a lack of synchronization between voice and image, take a moment to consider the price tag, because we sure do. This is Dan Rather signing off."
The anagrams never lie! I particularly like that one :)
One fellow ("ntsucks") said, "Either Intel has a stunning ability to improve its engineering process and timelines or they were withholding better chips until we had all purchase their current chip du jour"...
:)
To which I would have to add, "...or they are talking absolute crap".
Come on, people, get real. You're being manipulated. It's crazy to take some company's random promises as accomplished facts. You sure wouldn't do it for Apple, why pretend that Intel has a crystal ball? The intelligence you're insulting is strictly your own, 'cause other people are reading your comments and going "uh-HUH. Riiiiight. Aren't people credulous? Damn."
Seriously. Take a few deep breaths.
Nonsense. They are, as every chip manufacturer is, pushing as hard as they possibly can to advance the state of the art. If a G4 stomps all over a PIII in certain applications, it does not mean that Intel has secret PIIIIs or PIIIIIIIs sitting in dark closets waiting to produce, it means that Intel is no longer producing the highest performance chips. What with the Athlon work being done, it is possible that Intel is now the weakest of major chip manufacturers now that Cyrixes and WinChips aren't exactly a factor.
Not only could they not 'release this processor at any time', they still haven't released it, and there is every reason to believe they will not release it in the manner they suggest either. It will take longer or be slower. They don't have stuff waiting offstage- this is _the_ premier 'paranoid corporation', the last one in the world that would be sitting around going "Ho hum, we got this chip here, seems to go real fast. Maybe we should make some of them and sell them, or gosh, why don't we just ignore the competition and tack it up on the wall for a while instead? It's real purty-like."
Uh-uh. Sorry. There is no Intel Fairy. That mystical creature seems to be hanging around Motorola, nVidia and AMD these days...
I can't tell you how interesting and inspiring it is to see the above post.
I'm an extremist, myself- on Linux I gravitate towards the approach Tom prefers, with digressions for things like trying out piles of GNOME apps to see what that's like (tried KDE, didn't like the 'winix' feel of the apps). However, when my Dr. Jekyll side takes over, Winix or for that matter Windows itself is pathetically inadequate, and I boot into MacOS day in and day out, running a set of habitual stable programs and not being bothered with inconsistencies on the scale of a Windows or Winix. So in some senses I would have to consider myself so much of a GUI purist that, again, Windows is pathetically inadequate, and Winix only gets by because it's too primitive to offer the full morass of Windows-like GUI crud!
Most of your basic GUI functionality was present in MacOS before even System Six- there have been some very important refinements, particularly in defining semantics for drag and drop of various different datatypes between apps and in window zooming logic (which wasn't really perfected until System 7 and 8), but on the whole the essence of GUI is in offering a _simple_ and physically direct interface. Mere pictures are not enough- the ridiculous toolbarness of Windows and Winix is every bit as arcane as the most strangely-named Unix commands, only with pictures. It takes a lot of selfdiscipline to keep a GUI approachable and learnable- something that Windows disdains to do, and something that Winix/X in general never considered doing (for example, consider the classic X text handling mousebutton boondoggle! It entirely replaces direct manipulation with an emphasis on weird specialised controls, presumably so the mousehandling code will be simpler).
What is the alternative? It is what Tom is talking about. It's not elitist- but it is very different. Consider a user interface where operations are no longer behaviors of 'app' objects lying around like Swiss Army Knives- instead they are like words that must be formed into sentences, new sentences for every need, an 'interface' that must be learned but is then used unthinkingly for years.
I had to zap several lines of many HTML files the other day. My boss, with great effort and inconvenience, managed to fix the lines in one file and upload it by FTP to the website, using Windows tools. This involved a great deal of GUI manipulation. Using Winix tools would have required a comparable amount of clicking and manipulating (assuming a remote client), as it was inherent in the approach. I tired of watching him and said, 'Give me a terminal', and took over, doing all the rest of the files in vi on the webhosting machine itself, remotely via terminal, with the following commands: vi *foo.html, (arrowkeys), dd, dd, dd, dd, dd, ZZ. Lather, rinse, repeat- I could have been faster if I wanted to rush. Yet I'd had to learn, earlier, that vi had 'modes', what 'dd' and 'ZZ' meant, and how to run vi on a text file.
If I was still more literate, the nature of the exact problem that faced me was a natural for a recursive line-deleting script, in that the deleted lines were always identical. If I spoke Unix even more fluently, the image is of me looking at one of the files, copying some text or making note of the lines to be deleted, and then effortlessly writing about two lines of bafflingly cryptic line noise script (if that!), hitting return, and just walking away. Done. Done all the same even if it was thousands of files to correct, because I had the power to identify common factors among the work to be done, and Unix had the power to let me address only the exact tasks that had to be performed, and to build a 'sentence' that was the Unix translation of "See those lines? Go through all the files and delete them when you see them."
I didn't have quite that power. I vied with all the files individually, hampered by the terminal's inability to do tab filename completion (sorely missed), and still each task took easy seconds, not in spite of the lack of a GUI, but because there were no actions to perform that did not directly relate to what I was doing, and because the few vi commands I had committed to memory (just by use, nothing more) happened to perfectly suit the tasks I had to perform.
If Linux becomes completely synonymous with KDE and Gnome, it will be cheating itself of some incredible potentialities- yet it cannot ever completely lose this. Anyone can fire up six different kinds of term (even if many people's goal is to never have to use one!) and all of this is latent, waiting to be used.
More relevantly, the mere existence of KDE and Gnome does not mean that nobody is thinking about how to best maximize the classic potential of Unix, but combine it with the eye candy of modern window managers. I know I have a whiteboard right now filled with brainstorming on how to combine an eyecandy window manager with a powerful emphasis on term windows and methods of manipulating them and handling them. I'm talking not a GUI in which you can run terms, but a windowing environment centrally focussed on certain possibilities inherent in the concept of fixed-character-dimensions terms and use of a mouse to manage window positioning and launch icon-resident processes (and I'm thinking one button mouse with rightclicking being the extra value, rather than two-button or three-button as compulsory to be able to do anything).
It's not ready yet. I'm still working on it and in fact I need some window manager behaviors that I'll have to learn to program, because nothing, not even E, does quite what I'm thinking of. But it's coming, because regardless of current fashion there IS another way of doing things, and the way to make it approachable is not to put buttons on everything, but to think out and design the concepts so that they make sense when used as language.
Once people start using language-style interfaces, they never let go...
"sure MS users can view it, but with the proliferation of set-top-boxes et. al that don't use IE, MS will be forced to comply to the standards..."
Certainly not. In the situation of a proprietary MS web, only the set top boxes produced by MS proliferate, and in some cases the most common authoring software might well be tweaked to produce code that intentionally fails to work on whatever set-top boxes aren't made by MS, unless the vendors license proprietary IE code at extortionate prices from MS.
I'm surprised you missed that, it's the most obvious thing in the world. We are already about 80% of the way towards that proprietary MS web, it's just that what with the DoJ case and Netscape only recently having died and AOL not being dead enough yet, MS doesn't choose to start turning the screws just yet. The time to start changing everything to really punish anything non-MS and render it useless is about a year and a half from now assuming their plans continue effectively. Until that time it is not in their best interest to put on the pressure. It's like hunting and chasing something- they have to let the rest of the computer industry run until it is tired before they catch up to it and snap its collective neck. Closing with it too early is overly chancy, and not the behavior of a smart predator, and MS may be a dreadfully sloppy software developer but they are a very smart predator and always have been, in the sense that Sweeney Todd may have been a terrible barber but was a very effective murderer.
If I have an idea, I have three choices:
- Sit on it until a big corp matches it and enjoins me from using it ever again
- Use it and risk being taken to court when the big corp figures out it can win purely because it can challenge my right to the idea, and I can't pay to fight it
- GPL the bugger, whereupon it's very unlikely that I personally can profit from the idea in the usual sense, but on the other hand it's very likely that the idea can't be taken away from me, ever, and _that_ might be worth something to me, independent of my desire to not let the corp own it.
I go for option 3, unhesitatingly. How about you?Cellular is a fairly unimportant little cellular automata program.
;) ). It's fought with ideas, and sacrifices have to be made. If intellectual property is not to be become a ball and chain, if people are to retain the ability to work with their minds and retain control over their own ideas and clever inventions, it seems the only safe haven anymore is the hardcore free (libre) software side- the determination to produce ideas and add them to the shared hoard. If these ideas are in use and known to be in existence, matching ideas cannot be patented. If the ideas are unsung and never seen by anybody, then lawyers will have a relatively easy time raising doubt that a matching idea came first. Publicity is the friend of free software, the handmaiden of 'prior art'.
Staccato is a reminder program, which might have some ideas relating to intelligent input parsing somebody is trying to patent. It sets things up so entries in the info file are very easily done, with the 'API' extremely easy to master. I'm sure someone would try to patent that.
Sitebot is a particular method of keeping data files as plain text with a couple of easily added headers, and 'compiling' that into a website which can then be uploaded. If anybody means to patent a narrowly defined method for writing plaintext and having it read and turned into a web site with the same structure as the plaintext files and folders, Sitebot is prior art.
ROTSOS (Return of the Son of Spacewar) is the best yet, being a radically different approach to game engine design. It offers literally the ability to produce game 'maps' equivalent to data files billions of gigs in size, in fact the ability to have billions of worlds each with 'maps' (not all of which will be distinct, but for all practical purposes...). It requires that game map creation be an exploratory process rather than a creative process, a major innovation in map design IMHO as the person who came up with it after reading lots of stuff on AI and artificial life. Took some years to work out, and naturally I've had to produce flashy demos (mostly movies, others to come) to illustrate what's being done here.
What do all these software products have in common, from the trivial to the actually innovative?
They are _all_ Free Software under the GNU GPL. That is including ROTSOS, and I have every expectation that somebody else with ship a GPLed game before I can get one together. I understand that and approve of it. I also understand that I'm going to stay poor and won't get diddly from all this.
Then why on earth am I doing it?
Because I'm just another soldier in a different sort of war. This patent stuff is deadly serious, but it's not fought with guns (unless they are patentable
So.... STEAL MY SOFTWARE!!!! That's right- go grovel through its ugly depths for any ideas that might make your open source project take off! Grab anything you want! Be grateful or not, say nice things about what neat ideas I have or not- the only requirement is that it stay GPL. Take all the credit for stuff that I came up with, while releasing it as GPL! Because as long as somebody gets publicity for a GPLed idea or algorithm or program, as long as that idea is obviously prior art and not ripe for a patent, that means I get to keep using it. And if the ideas languish in obscurity, it's all the more likely that some clown will patent some broad notion, hire better lawyers and enjoin me from ever using the idea that was mine in the first place. I'm not kidding. Wittingly or not, this is war now.
Write GPLed software (that being the most hardcore of the licenses)! Get glaring publicity! Anybody who can, _please_ make sure as many ideas (broad or specific) are within the camp of 'free software, prior art' as possible. Because it's a real problem, a serious danger, and these people trying to fight it by staking out defensive patents are only compounding the problem.
Time to choose sides!
The trouble is this: a random selection of people has no particular qualifications for wisdom or knowledge. Unless you are ready to postulate a self-selecting superior race of Slashdot ACs^Hreaders ;) you run into the difficulty that the peers reviewing your idea have no clue about it. Peer review is not a populist thing, but an elitist one- you don't peer review scientific papers by handing them out in the street. In the case of the Jane's piece, there clearly were qualified peers available to review the work. In many other cases there wouldn't be- and Slashdot is not a selective forum, for the most part.
In fact, the nature of Slashdot is such that it is almost impossible for certain notions, such as unionization, to get reviewed with clarity, because the Slashdot population has self-selected to strongly favor libertarian beliefs, and beyond that to outright Randite views. This slant even manages to strongly color more computer-software-oriented socialist ideas, such as freedom of software being an end in itself and not solely a tool used to maximize profit. As a result, one is almost obligated to say 'OF COURSE open source is about maximizing efficiency and profit and anything else is icing on the cake', and it's equally obligatory for _somebody_ to slam the GPL's more social implications when that is brought into the discussion, as if to say, "You can talk all you want but you HAVE TO also pay credence to the TRUTH!".
All this merely underlines the point that Slashdot is its own special interest group, with no particular claim on the truth. Considered as a whole, Slashdot may have formidable resources to peer review some things. It may be clueless about other things, or even actively wrong and misguided about still other things, even things that seem to concern it deeply.
My picture of the average Slashdot viewpoint (not reader, just viewpoint) is of a viewpoint deeply educated in computer technology, naive in sociology, rather well-off and insulated from the harsher edge of modern society, similarly naive in politics and economics, with a strikingly optimistic viewpoint and lots of energy to bring great things to the world, but extremely willing to write off injustices and abuses as acceptable provided the abuser is acting in their own self interest, which is seen as so paramount that it is not ever to be questioned. As a result, the vision of the average Slashdot viewpoint (not reader, viewpoint) is very sharp but very narrow, prone to fixate on small details and fail to acknowledge there is a big picture- capable of spying a dim possibility on the horizon, _pursuing_ it and then actually _reaching_ that possibility where most people would never ever have got that far- and then looking around in complete surprise at the surroundings, having never given a thought to what else was there.
Thoughts?
It is not _instantly_ recognizable as Markov-chain travesty (which is the process by which this travesty was generated, Markov chaining- I have a twisted little story edited from Markov chained output, called Speak Roughly To Your Evidence) :) normal writers can be instantly distinguished from travesty. Katz already shows some behavior that is similar to travesty, for instance the surprising fact that the first and third lines of his story start with the exact same six words and punctuation, and the second line is a sentence fragment.
Instead, this Katz travesty requires a moment of actual reading to discover that its incoherency and sloppiness is not Katz's usual sort, but far worse and more random. That's kind of scary
What is Katz, really? This travesty and the disturbing realisation that it shares more with the original source than one would expect raises some unusual questions. Katz _is_ a living human being, unless Rob Malda is playing some really, really weird mind game with us- so what is happening with these very Markov-like writing habits? Is this a suggestion that the human thought processes draw more from Markov chaining than we'd like to admit- and that clarity and coherency are derived from a sort of 'overseer' level in the brain that looks at the entire work as a whole, and censors redundancies and incompleted thoughts- a 'censor' level that in Jon Katz is not working effectively?
Legal? Yes, absolutely. I wouldn't argue with that a bit, and I'm sure there's some legal bits requiring that officers maximize stock value at all costs.
Moral? *rofl* Nonsense! This silly notion has justified so many repugnant outrages, from the Nestle baby formula, to the same jerky behavior that routinely gets Apple raked over the coals on Slashdot, to most things Microsoft has ever done worth being outraged about. There are no moral rules written into corporate law. If you think that working for a corporation automatically gives you the obligation to ignore your own morality and that of the world at large, and extort, abuse, lie, and harm in the name of being good to the corporation, then please don't ever work for a corporation, OK?
Er, you are talking about the people who have produced actual quotes such as "What we want is a reasonable share of the market. What is a reasonable share? 100% seems reasonable".
They're not fooling. Why don't you see this?
That is EXACTLY the point. FedEx, UPS, etcetera, are free to say, "We don't deliver to such-and-such areas," or "we charge a 2000 percent surcharge to anyone not living within twenty miles of a major city." And they will, and they especially will if you hao other options. I recently had a FedEx guy refuse to _climb_ _stairs_ to knock on my door- to him, if my (useless) doorbell wasn't working, I didn't deserve 'express package delivery'. (Bugger was carrying my O'Reilly books too!)
The price is almost irrelevant. The real issue is that if it was a private corporation, they would instantly disenfranchise anybody living in that shack at the top of a mountain- thus getting the lower price. Well, other countries may feel differently (socialist ones may actually understand this even better than we do!) but the USA was founded on the concept that _everyone_ counts, and that the government looks after everybody's interests, as best it can- very likely unimpressively, but you have to give it points just for being willing to try. The mail system is a perfect example- it is in fact pretty competitive on price with the private corporations (though you can pay extra to a private corporation whose representative then refuses to bother to knock on your door and squanders the time savings you thought you were buying), but the real issue is what the private corporations will refuse to do because it's a money sink- who they'll put the screws to in order to make better offers to the majority.
Damn right it's socialist thinking. This nation was founded on little carefully chosen bits of socialist thinking. It's a problem when that is lightly brushed aside. Why yes, let's disband the post office! Hell, let's disband the judicial system, and law enforcement, and people can take their gripes and concerns, for instance about fraud practiced by big corporations, or negligence resulting in loss of life, to efficient for-pay courts paid for by the mysteriously immune-from-guilt defendants! Then they can be informed of the loss of their suit through a for-pay mail system that refuses to deliver to an address that won't co-pay (or something- now wouldn't that be profitable: pay to get your mail!). Most efficiently of all, we could have the for-pay law enforcement take notice of these miserable plebian worthless drags on the country, and go out and shoot them in the head, whereby the whole nation can be made to run more efficiently and profitably!
If anybody thinks that isn't sarcasm, go see a doctor...
Sure. The engine is not the game. The engine is also not necessarily the cheat. ;) )
I'm personally developing some enginelike stuff as GPLed free software: currently it's some terrain generation and universe generation code and ideas. (end plug
As far as open source gaming is concerned, there are some things becoming apparent. The actual direction of a game has to be 'steered': I've seen projects that worked and projects that tanked and the difference is leadership and the willingness to say 'No, your idea is rejected', particularly in the realm of artistic decisions. If you go with pure committee-like democratic rule, you lose: someone has to be the hatchetman, and you have to pick people capable of fulfulling their roles.
Given that, the question is kind of like 'if you can get the source to Apache and hack it, doesn't that make all Apache web sites insecure dead meat?'. Certainly not- it's a question of what sort of API you let a client use to communicate with a server. Ideally you work things out very carefully, and also make _no_ allowance for anybody to 'adjust' the game, not even the game authors. With a hidden API for adjusting player parameters, you're toast- in fact any critical data that you store on the client is toast, somebody will hack it even if it has to be done by hex editing. So the concepts that are important are keeping vital data on the server, and implementing no way of adjusting this data except by the normal playing of the game. Basically, if you the game developer can do it then somebody else can, with sufficient determination, even if that would mean getting physical access to the machine, social engineering etc, bribery or whatever. This does require that the game mechanics be really thoroughly worked out in advance, particularly areas that could be abused.
So the bottom line is that Microsoft wrote that report itself? _Very_ cute. Even cuter that Microsoft in addition to writing the report funded that bit of Gartner to host it. yaaaaah! fnord!
Yikes! Is it me? I read the bit about an addition to HTTP (thinking "hey hey HEY WHOA run that by me again please?"), and I was wondering exactly how incompatible this would be with existing Web software (does this relate to the client at all? All those old netscapes out there, made useless?) and then it hit me...
Isn't the gag that you're supposed to not drop the soap in the showers because of what would happen to you when you bend over to "pick up the SOAP"?
Is that an accident or are these guys really that cynical? Are they actually considering 'secondary' embrace and extend effects to existing stuff like HTTP to be primary, is the primary agenda here to, you know? "Wups! Looks like it might be a good idea for you to PICK UP THE SOAP!" *plook*
Certainly that's what they are trying to do to the government and DoJ funding, but are they really thinking like this at all levels, so much that it colors their product names and makes anal rape their personal metaphor for the embrace and extend planning? Why are they not being more careful about this potential public relations disaster?
Painful though it can be... :) actually, thinking about it makes me want to put on that 'station'! Also, listening to shortwave stations in languages I don't understand is another coding-positive sound environment. Usually it's just silence though, which is why I have a tough time working when it's not very late at night. I need _real_ silence, not random peoplenoise from outside :P
I play too many instruments- any music worth a damn tends to make me sing/drum/play along with it or at least _think_ it so powerfully that there's no way I can code.
Oddly enough, I have found a sound I can code to, it's just a disturbing sound. Occasionally I will listen to the satellites just beyond the 30-meter shortwave band. It's a roaring electronic noise with rumble and an alien electronic twitter overlaid on it, and will happily continue for hours without a break like an 'environments' record. The fact that it is really abrasive bothers me not at all
Sorry: like I said, other people can cover their own concerns. There are too many valid concerns for one person to deal with, and I do not agree that Microsoft should be allowed to use its money and lobbying power and pet senator to shut off entire branches of government it does not like.
Do you see Cowpland and Corel trying to get the government to turn off insider trading regulations?
Feel free to moderate this down too if you want, but exactly why is the idea "total pragmatism does not define ethical, ethical is the consideration of broader social concerns", 'overrated'? I'm aware that's just a single moderator's opinion, but somebody must have felt very strongly about it to bother using a point on it. What is the deal and does that indicate a conscious decision to render social concerns irrelevant?
The government has seen whores before, so this Washington senator shouldn't get too far. Besides, it's just another case of Microsoft believing that, and behaving like, they outrank the government, the law, and the American people.t or ticket, and totally ignore anything else including party lines to do so, and let other people take care of the other valid concerns of politics. Indeed, I'm almost _forced_ to because of how much money is being spent corrupting the government and my representatives. I'm a vermonter, and I think Bernie Sanders is sound, but I have concerns that Jeffords is getting corrupted. At any rate, I'm definitely going to be a one-issue voter currently- everything else falls by the wayside compared to the destruction of the economy and the country by tech trusts. That's my privilege, and if it stops being such a threat I can think of other issues and pay attention to them a bit more.
We've seen all this before. Hell, at one point it was the President acting like this! (Read up on Watergate!) It just doesn't fly, the Senate and the House of Representatives are there for a reason. It's like a jury- the idea is, if there is anybody who cannot tolerate the 'tyranny of the majority', they get a veto and then the country has to muddle through with a compromise to look after the best interests of _all_ the people, not just those with the loudest voices. In this case, I know there are a couple senators etc. who aren't whores for _this_ special interest, and I personally am quite happy to vote a straight don't-let-corporate-monopolies-wreck-the-tech-sec
It's perfectly valid to object to Windows NT on the basis of the consequences of such support. Taking a stance of complete moral neutrality and blindness is not necessarily wrong (you have to pick your fights, and leave some other ones alone for people who are more interested or committed), but I disagree that it is in any way ethical.
I would say this decision of Carmack's was courageous, gutsy, but not in the slightest ethical. He could have chosen to base the decision on ethical grounds, at which point endorsing Microsoft products may not have seemed like the winning move. Instead he decided to go with total pragmatism based on the current snapshot of the industry, and when it changes he'll re-evaluate. On the one hand I believe and respect that, on the other he has personally taken action to impede its changing- Carmack endorsing NT at the current moment _is_ valuable to MS, make no mistake, and that value and advantage will be spun and used as a weapon whether he meant it that way or not.
So it's not really about whether Carmack can identify the optimal platform for his needs at the moment- if that's all it was, then NT could always be that platform, thanks to MS sabotage and buyouts if necessary. The question is whether that alone is enough, and that's a personal question that everybody must answer for themselves.
I know that for myself, I've already thought about this question a lot (obviously, since I'm a Mac/LinuxPPC user), and my answer is that I'm ready to be inconvenienced in some ways in order to get other conveniences, and in order to feel like I have options in the industry. If I chose to endorse Microsoft products, that would mean that I had intentionally changed my mind and decided that it was best to encourage a situation where only one vendor won, and everything else was basically crushed, because that's what Microsoft does. Currently I'm not ready to 'endorse' that, and for me these concerns are inextricably bound up with the more pragmatic concerns: for this reason I was completely unmoved by Carmack's perspective. I'd considered that already, and it lost to 'broader social concerns' or however you want to phrase it.
I hope other slashdotters are able to take this in the proper context. There seems to be a sense of 'Carmack says NT, therefore everybody should use that until Linux is better', and I don't consider that a sensible position.
As for the _software_ specifically, again, look at Pro Tools. It's possible that you might go with a GIMP-like 'zillion add-ons' scenario, but there are certain things that must be there, and without them you're nowhere professionally but with them platform means nothing to a DAW:
- internal calculations at vastly higher bit depth than your output bit depth (which will be 16 or 24 bit- internal needs to be 32 or 64 or more)
- seriously great dithering to translate the final output to the desired bit depth, otherwise the added depth is wasted
- realtime. This is where the Mac shines, as you can starve the OS of cycles with trivial ease. To be professional there must _never_ be a dropout of even one sample in duration. To produce pro-quality DAW software, first work out how to make it realtime, even if you don't think it's necessary. You _have_ to treat it as necessary because eventually something will get tangled up and unless you have it running as realtime priority, able to starve _anything_ in the machine to play continuously, you'll get a hiccup- and have to do it over- at twenty thousand dollars an hour (not unreasonable for the total cost of having a superstar group in a really topflight recording studio).
That said, there's no reason why Linux couldn't seize this market, given a suitable understanding of its requirements. However, it's important to not make the mistake the GIMP made- to the best of my knowledge, the GIMP calculates internally in RGB color. (If it calculates internally in 128-bit RGB color, downplay this critique, but gamut is still an issue). Its pro-tool competition, Photoshop, calculates internally in LAB color, which exceeds the gamut of RGB color, and this causes every single operation it offers to be done with a broader palette of colors (not necessarily higher resolution! But a broader gamut).As far as I know, there _are_ no other pixel editing tools that calculate in LAB (Luminance, A and B) color, so the GIMP can basically beat everything else, but this core design decision is limiting. A comparable digital audio opensource project would be well advised to overdesign from the start. On the bright side, there's nothing quite the same as the gamut problem in digital audio, so the main thing would be to calculate in a high enough bit depth and make sure there are never dropouts or error-corrections- given that, future amazing dithering algorithms could be done as plugins, and the project could rival or beat anything commercial