This is why you see papers like the Times printing lots of stories about themselves when they catch a reporter plagarizing; because when you out yourself, you get to keep a little face.
Oh, yeah, right. That's why the Times was all over Judith Miller and Armstrong Williams and their conflicts of interest when they were acting as shills for the White House and uncritically publishing their lies as fact... Oh, wait. They weren't.
It was the blogs that reported on these developments honestly and incisively. The Times has an Imperial assload to answer for.
ClearCase is proprietary; source code is not available. That means any quirks in ClearCase that depend on a particular distribution can't be fixed at the source level, and you have to rely on the vendor for support. This support is often perfunctory at best, and most commonly non-existent.
The most obvious quirk is the location of various config and library files. Sometimes, even the app's installation directory is different (/opt versus/usr/local versus administrator-established).
A less-obvious quirk is kernel dependencies. ClearCase ships with a kernel filesystem module (no source code). Again, things may have improved in recent months, but it used to be all you got was a binary module which was compiled against a specific kernel -- namely, a "standard" RedHat kernel with RedHat-specific mods. If you had recompiled the RedHat kernel, or you weren't running a RedHat kernel at all, then you were SOL, and couldn't use the kernel module (which, in the instance of ClearCase, is fairly crippling to its use).
This is exactly the kind of nonsense Microsoft thrives on.
Where is the problem exactly ?
Especially since you can install these binaries in any Linux distros, just by creating a custom package. Just like some distros did for firefox binaries.
This doesn't make the OS closed at all.
Try installing ClearCase on anything other than RedHat or SUSE. Things may have improved in the last few months, but SUSE only received official support just over a year ago. Prior to that, it was RedHat only. If you were/are a Debian user, you were essentially SOL.
Linux distros can, in fact, be marginalized by precisely the kind of half-baked support Microsoft plans.
All were very good micro chips and had a lot of systems based on their use. I wouldn't say that the 6502 was the best of the bunch.
Having first learned 8080 assembly, I ended up fairly despising the 6502 for its dearth of, well, everything -- registers, speed, 16-bit operations, stack space...
The 68000 was a very nice architecture by comparison, and the ARM was even nicer than that. I rather liked them both.
As fate would have it, I have my hands in an HCS08-based part at the moment (6800 derivative), and it's like programming a 6502 again, except with all the shortcomings fixed.
Have the last 25 years taught people nothing? Microsoft's OS products always suck. Always. DOS sucked. Windows 3.1 sucked. Windows 95 sucked. Windows 98 sucked. Windows ME (harder) sucked. Windows 2000 sucked slightly less, but it still sucked. And Windows XP continued in this tradition.
Previously, the suckage was confined to incremental changes, but now they've gone and re-written a significant chunk of it from scratch, and added a ton of new, unproven techniques and technologies. Microsoft's reputation on these points is fairly well established by now.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that Microsoft has learned any kind of lesson, or that this time things will somehow magically be different. If you honestly think Windows Vista will be an idyllic, trouble-free upgrade, you are an imbecile.
Windows Vista will be an enormous disruption in how people use their computers. They will have to learn the new environment and the new software that goes with it, and it will be some time before they get used to it and become comfortable with it. Well. If you're already planning on disrupting your computing experience that much in the vague hope that, "Maybe this time will be better," then you are obliged to try out Linux.
Upgrading your machine to Linux will be no more disruptive than "upgrading" to Vista. You won't have to upgrade your hardware, you won't have to pay Microsoft 200-some dollars for the privilege, and the end result will be a machine that's more secure and meets your needs and responds to your commands, not someone else's.
If you're already willing to undergo the pain and misery of Vista, then you're a fool if you don't try Linux as well.
I think you may be mis-conceptualizing the relationship between you and the people you vote for. We give them fancy titles like, "Mayor," and "Governor," and "Senator," but that only serves to obscure what they actually are.
They're your employees.
And you're their boss.
You hired them to do a job -- to look after the day-to-day management issues of maintaining civilization. Some of them do forward planning, anticipating future needs and trying to get in front of it so the community infrastructure will be ready.
Make no mistake: If they weren't there doing the job, you'd have to do it. That includes everything from managing and building relationships with foreign powers and defending the realm against hostiles, all the way down to keeping the streets clean. You've hired them to do this work, so that you don't have to and can pursue higher goals.
Well, every couple of years or so come Performance Reviews. You are in charge of this, and it is up to you to review your employees' work and decide whether they should stay on, or let them go in favor of a new applicant. Are we in good standing with our neighbors? Is the treasury full and well-managed? Are we in a position to handle the changes we foresee 5, 10, 20 years down the road? Can we handle the unexpected (fire, flood, earthquake)? Can we effectively defend ourselves? Are the streets clean?
Asking these questions and making these evaluations is your job; this is what you have to do to be a good boss. Yes, it's bloody inconvenient, but it's a farkload more convenient that having to do yourself all that work you hired them to do. And if you don't do it, you risk your employees taking advantage of you.
ISPs are the road; your machine is the car. LIke you said, the road builders have nothing to do with your shitty car.
What if the car, instead of having normal rubber tires, has steel spikes that gouge holes out of the road, ruining it for everyone? Surely the road owner/steward would have something to say about allowing that car or "tires" of that type on the road.
Just when you thought Micros~1 couldn't get any more stupid...
This is either PR bluster designed to obscure either that A) They couldn't get Janus to work; or B) their marketing people have completely jumped the shark, and have misconceptualized the appeal of digital music in general and the iPod in particular.
The whole point of digital music is that you can move it around to where you need it. If I need it on my PC, I drop it there. When I need it on my laptop, I drop a copy there. When I want to hear it over my TV, I point the TiVo at my PC file server and have it play. When I want it in my car, I put it on an SD card, shove it in my Zodiac, and go.
In a perverse way, it actually doesn't surprise me that Microsoft can't accomplish that one simple thing.
The first trap that pops into my mind is that Microsoft will offer some proprietary server/service software for both Windows and SUSE Linux. Probably some kind of ActiveDirectory support or something. It will be easy to set up and use, and will work well in corporate environments where there are tons of Windows desktops.
Fast-forward two years, after Vista's gotten entrenched (they wish) and Vista SP1 rolls out. SP1 depends on a newer version of the service. Microsoft releases a new version of the service as well, but only for Windows, and end-of-life's the Linux version as "too difficult to support." Linux boxes that once were solidly in the server room suddenly get re-imaged to Windows to run the new "required" service update. Poof! Linux takes a big hit.
So Linux itself is not attacked directly, but it suffers just the same. Just off the top of my head, of course...
I'm pleased to hear the Comedy Central stuff will be reappearing on GoogTube. Comedy Central has clips available on their own Web site, but the player is absolute crap. I never got it to work. YouTube's works, so this is a happy thing.
I was wondering when you Americans are going to fix your country. [... ]
...Wha? Sorry, could you repeat that? We were too busy trying to figure out Lost...
Seriously, I don't think enough is going to change until electoral participation becomes as broadly embraced and popular a pastime as following the exploits of disasterous voids of character like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.
In case you didn't know, NIMF is a right-of-center conservative, sensationalist group that finds things -- anything -- to complain about in the media. These are the same guys who gave a grade of 'F' to the ESRB's rating system. They also advocate -- with soon-to-be-ex-Senator Joe Lieberman as their mouthpiece -- a uniform media rating system monitored by an "independent" oversight group.
They're not nearly as bad as James Dobson's "Focus on the Family" group. In fact, they've actually told Jack Thompson to take a hike. But they are in no way the friends of the games industry. Given NIMF's record, the "summit" likely had nothing to do with a frank exchange of views or exploring the true nature of mass media and its impact on the human psyche, and was just a schmooze-fest for people bent on circumventing the First Amendment.
Attending would have only legitimized the event. The games industry was correct to stay away.
When the resources became available, I was going to buy one of those SD card media players/storage devices for the Nintendo DS Lite. Evidently it's one of the easiest ways to do homebrew development on the DS.
They almost have this on the shelves at Fry's -- a MediaMax cartridge with a built-in 4 gig drive. But that's a little costly at $150.00. The SD card reader version was considerably cheaper, but apparently was only (easily) available through Lik-Sang. Well, now that they're dead, I don't know how I'm going to obtain one at all, much less at a fair price.
In a previous life, I did some development on the Nintendo GBA. We obtained the compatible FLASH carts and programmers from Lik-Sang and got some interesting prototypes running. The Nintendo DS is an insanely cute little device, and I'm rather interested in cobbling a few things together for it. I guess it's back to Google to look for alternatives. Drat, blast, and fie...
If any are watching, I wish to request of the editors that the headline to this article be changed.
Despite the fervent wishes of certain unbalanced extremists, prior restraint in publishing is not recognized in US law, except in cases of national security, and only then when circumstances are extraordinary. Right to publish is automatic. Thus, the Judge did not "clear" anything for publishing, as judges do not have that right in this country.
A less misleading headline might be, "Judge Refuses to Block Publication of 'Bully'", or, "No Reason to Block Take-Two's 'Bully', says Judge", or,"Take-Two's 'Bully' No Threat to National Security".
VirtuaWin is a mandatory component of any new machine I set up for myself. I have it installed at home and at work, and I use it constantly. Windows is nearly unusable without it. And it's Free Software. Highly, highly recommended.
First off, it was the computer games industry that invented copy protection. Coming up on thirty years, they've been dealing with it longer than any other segment of the "digital content" industries. They have decided, wrongly or otherwise, that copy protection is a necessary evil. They're completely entrenched, they swim in the Kool-Aid, and no amount of bloviating here is going to change their position.
That said, as much as I detest copy protection, I trust w4r3z k1dd13s even less. Despite being colossal jackasses about it, Blizzard at least has an ethical, commercial, and legal obligation not to fsck up my computer or data. If Blizzard does fsck up my machine, I have legal and social recourse. They have a reputation to protect, and so it is in their interest to deal fairly.
Not so with hackers who remove copy protection and other product defects (or, perhaps more to the point, claim to remove such defects). The guy I'm downloading the modded copy from may be a trustworthy, noble-minded hacker seeking only to improve the game's flexibility and reliability. Or, he could be an a--hole trying to steal my identity, build his botnet and spray spam all over the place, concealing his malware inside the game. Or, he could simply be incompetent and end up crashing my machine very unpleasantly. Either way, I have no way of knowing. There is no "reputation marketplace" (that I'm aware of) where I can feel comfortable or safe obtaining such material.
So unless and until the DMCA is demolished, I'm kinda stuck here. The game publishers will not stop incorporating defects into their products, and no one can build a trustworthy reputation for removing such defects.
Schwab
P.S: It's probably worth prominently acknowledging that Epic Games have been very accommodating with their Unreal Tournament game series. They start out with disc-in-the-drive protection, but it's soon removed in subsequent official patches. One of the friendliest policies out there.
It should be obvious to anyone not pushing a socio-political agenda that aggression and violence are innate human traits.
As a sporadic member of the video game industry, the issue of violence-in-video-games is not at all new or novel to us. Nor have we been deliberately ignoring it. Far from it. Game authors have been considering the issue for about as long as video games have existed.
In 1977, a man named Steve Dompier wrote a game for the Sol-20 Terminal Computer called TARGET. Ships flew across the screen, and it was your job to shoot them down. I'd like to share with you a thought from the game's author, printed in the manual. It seems that video game violence was on his mind as well:
There are several types of spaceships containing dangerous cargoes of pesticides, DNA
experiments, artificial flavorings, TV commercials and so on. They should be stopped
before they reach a civilized area of the universe and endanger the populace. [... ]
[Author's note: The game player may relate to the ships and missiles of TARGET
as objects personally imagined by him. The above scenario is
provided for those with an aversion to the destructive type games
who may otherwise mistake the robot spaceships as earthly in
origin. Aggression, still being a common human trait in 1977, is
better exercised with a zero-sum game than spent on the physical
real world. Besides--it's fun.]
The above quote serves as evidence that video game authors have been thinking about violence in games for thirty years, if not longer. So if you think some zeitgeist-chasing politician or religious extremist who just started shrieking about the issue last week has any deeper insights than we do... Well, then you may be interested in this bridge I have for sale.
Schwab
P.S: If you're interested in finding out what was so horrific about TARGET, download the Sol-20 emulator and try it yourself:
In the release folder, run the program solace.exe. You will be presented with a very unhelpful command prompt window.
From the File menu, select "Load Program..."
Select "targ.ent" and click OK.
In the command prompt window, enter the command: EX 0
and press Enter. You must enter the command in upper case.
The game will launch. Follow the on-screen instructions. (You can steer the missiles in flight with the aiming keys, crucial for getting high-value combo shots.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yeah, right. That's why the Times was all over Judith Miller and Armstrong Williams and their conflicts of interest when they were acting as shills for the White House and uncritically publishing their lies as fact... Oh, wait. They weren't.
It was the blogs that reported on these developments honestly and incisively. The Times has an Imperial assload to answer for.
Schwab
ClearCase is proprietary; source code is not available. That means any quirks in ClearCase that depend on a particular distribution can't be fixed at the source level, and you have to rely on the vendor for support. This support is often perfunctory at best, and most commonly non-existent.
The most obvious quirk is the location of various config and library files. Sometimes, even the app's installation directory is different (/opt versus /usr/local versus administrator-established).
A less-obvious quirk is kernel dependencies. ClearCase ships with a kernel filesystem module (no source code). Again, things may have improved in recent months, but it used to be all you got was a binary module which was compiled against a specific kernel -- namely, a "standard" RedHat kernel with RedHat-specific mods. If you had recompiled the RedHat kernel, or you weren't running a RedHat kernel at all, then you were SOL, and couldn't use the kernel module (which, in the instance of ClearCase, is fairly crippling to its use).
This is exactly the kind of nonsense Microsoft thrives on.
Schwab
Try installing ClearCase on anything other than RedHat or SUSE. Things may have improved in the last few months, but SUSE only received official support just over a year ago. Prior to that, it was RedHat only. If you were/are a Debian user, you were essentially SOL.
Linux distros can, in fact, be marginalized by precisely the kind of half-baked support Microsoft plans.
Schwab
Having first learned 8080 assembly, I ended up fairly despising the 6502 for its dearth of, well, everything -- registers, speed, 16-bit operations, stack space...
The 68000 was a very nice architecture by comparison, and the ARM was even nicer than that. I rather liked them both.
As fate would have it, I have my hands in an HCS08-based part at the moment (6800 derivative), and it's like programming a 6502 again, except with all the shortcomings fixed.
Schwab
I don't have a copy of the book; thanks for pointing out the rough spots.
Schwab
Previously, the suckage was confined to incremental changes, but now they've gone and re-written a significant chunk of it from scratch, and added a ton of new, unproven techniques and technologies. Microsoft's reputation on these points is fairly well established by now.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that Microsoft has learned any kind of lesson, or that this time things will somehow magically be different. If you honestly think Windows Vista will be an idyllic, trouble-free upgrade, you are an imbecile.
Windows Vista will be an enormous disruption in how people use their computers. They will have to learn the new environment and the new software that goes with it, and it will be some time before they get used to it and become comfortable with it. Well. If you're already planning on disrupting your computing experience that much in the vague hope that, "Maybe this time will be better," then you are obliged to try out Linux.
Upgrading your machine to Linux will be no more disruptive than "upgrading" to Vista. You won't have to upgrade your hardware, you won't have to pay Microsoft 200-some dollars for the privilege, and the end result will be a machine that's more secure and meets your needs and responds to your commands, not someone else's.
If you're already willing to undergo the pain and misery of Vista, then you're a fool if you don't try Linux as well.
Schwab
They're your employees.
And you're their boss.
You hired them to do a job -- to look after the day-to-day management issues of maintaining civilization. Some of them do forward planning, anticipating future needs and trying to get in front of it so the community infrastructure will be ready.
Make no mistake: If they weren't there doing the job, you'd have to do it. That includes everything from managing and building relationships with foreign powers and defending the realm against hostiles, all the way down to keeping the streets clean. You've hired them to do this work, so that you don't have to and can pursue higher goals.
Well, every couple of years or so come Performance Reviews. You are in charge of this, and it is up to you to review your employees' work and decide whether they should stay on, or let them go in favor of a new applicant. Are we in good standing with our neighbors? Is the treasury full and well-managed? Are we in a position to handle the changes we foresee 5, 10, 20 years down the road? Can we handle the unexpected (fire, flood, earthquake)? Can we effectively defend ourselves? Are the streets clean?
Asking these questions and making these evaluations is your job; this is what you have to do to be a good boss. Yes, it's bloody inconvenient, but it's a farkload more convenient that having to do yourself all that work you hired them to do. And if you don't do it, you risk your employees taking advantage of you.
It's your job. Get out there and do it.
Schwab
What if the car, instead of having normal rubber tires, has steel spikes that gouge holes out of the road, ruining it for everyone? Surely the road owner/steward would have something to say about allowing that car or "tires" of that type on the road.
Schwab
This is either PR bluster designed to obscure either that A) They couldn't get Janus to work; or B) their marketing people have completely jumped the shark, and have misconceptualized the appeal of digital music in general and the iPod in particular.
The whole point of digital music is that you can move it around to where you need it. If I need it on my PC, I drop it there. When I need it on my laptop, I drop a copy there. When I want to hear it over my TV, I point the TiVo at my PC file server and have it play. When I want it in my car, I put it on an SD card, shove it in my Zodiac, and go.
In a perverse way, it actually doesn't surprise me that Microsoft can't accomplish that one simple thing.
Schwab
Schwab
Fast-forward two years, after Vista's gotten entrenched (they wish) and Vista SP1 rolls out. SP1 depends on a newer version of the service. Microsoft releases a new version of the service as well, but only for Windows, and end-of-life's the Linux version as "too difficult to support." Linux boxes that once were solidly in the server room suddenly get re-imaged to Windows to run the new "required" service update. Poof! Linux takes a big hit.
So Linux itself is not attacked directly, but it suffers just the same. Just off the top of my head, of course...
Schwab
Schwab
...Wha? Sorry, could you repeat that? We were too busy trying to figure out Lost...
Seriously, I don't think enough is going to change until electoral participation becomes as broadly embraced and popular a pastime as following the exploits of disasterous voids of character like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.
Schwab
Schwab
That's true. "Unsanctioned music copying," is the correct term.
Schwab
In case you didn't know, NIMF is a right-of-center conservative, sensationalist group that finds things -- anything -- to complain about in the media. These are the same guys who gave a grade of 'F' to the ESRB's rating system. They also advocate -- with soon-to-be-ex-Senator Joe Lieberman as their mouthpiece -- a uniform media rating system monitored by an "independent" oversight group.
They're not nearly as bad as James Dobson's "Focus on the Family" group. In fact, they've actually told Jack Thompson to take a hike. But they are in no way the friends of the games industry. Given NIMF's record, the "summit" likely had nothing to do with a frank exchange of views or exploring the true nature of mass media and its impact on the human psyche, and was just a schmooze-fest for people bent on circumventing the First Amendment.
Attending would have only legitimized the event. The games industry was correct to stay away.
Schwab
They almost have this on the shelves at Fry's -- a MediaMax cartridge with a built-in 4 gig drive. But that's a little costly at $150.00. The SD card reader version was considerably cheaper, but apparently was only (easily) available through Lik-Sang. Well, now that they're dead, I don't know how I'm going to obtain one at all, much less at a fair price.
In a previous life, I did some development on the Nintendo GBA. We obtained the compatible FLASH carts and programmers from Lik-Sang and got some interesting prototypes running. The Nintendo DS is an insanely cute little device, and I'm rather interested in cobbling a few things together for it. I guess it's back to Google to look for alternatives. Drat, blast, and fie...
Schwab
Schwab
Despite the fervent wishes of certain unbalanced extremists, prior restraint in publishing is not recognized in US law, except in cases of national security, and only then when circumstances are extraordinary. Right to publish is automatic. Thus, the Judge did not "clear" anything for publishing, as judges do not have that right in this country.
A less misleading headline might be, "Judge Refuses to Block Publication of 'Bully'", or, "No Reason to Block Take-Two's 'Bully', says Judge", or,"Take-Two's 'Bully' No Threat to National Security".
Schwab
Solution #2:
Schwab
Schwab
That said, as much as I detest copy protection, I trust w4r3z k1dd13s even less. Despite being colossal jackasses about it, Blizzard at least has an ethical, commercial, and legal obligation not to fsck up my computer or data. If Blizzard does fsck up my machine, I have legal and social recourse. They have a reputation to protect, and so it is in their interest to deal fairly.
Not so with hackers who remove copy protection and other product defects (or, perhaps more to the point, claim to remove such defects). The guy I'm downloading the modded copy from may be a trustworthy, noble-minded hacker seeking only to improve the game's flexibility and reliability. Or, he could be an a--hole trying to steal my identity, build his botnet and spray spam all over the place, concealing his malware inside the game. Or, he could simply be incompetent and end up crashing my machine very unpleasantly. Either way, I have no way of knowing. There is no "reputation marketplace" (that I'm aware of) where I can feel comfortable or safe obtaining such material.
So unless and until the DMCA is demolished, I'm kinda stuck here. The game publishers will not stop incorporating defects into their products, and no one can build a trustworthy reputation for removing such defects.
Schwab
P.S: It's probably worth prominently acknowledging that Epic Games have been very accommodating with their Unreal Tournament game series. They start out with disc-in-the-drive protection, but it's soon removed in subsequent official patches. One of the friendliest policies out there.
Who's yanking whose chain here?
Schwab
P.S: Yes, it's an excellent video.
As a sporadic member of the video game industry, the issue of violence-in-video-games is not at all new or novel to us. Nor have we been deliberately ignoring it. Far from it. Game authors have been considering the issue for about as long as video games have existed.
In 1977, a man named Steve Dompier wrote a game for the Sol-20 Terminal Computer called TARGET. Ships flew across the screen, and it was your job to shoot them down. I'd like to share with you a thought from the game's author, printed in the manual. It seems that video game violence was on his mind as well:
The above quote serves as evidence that video game authors have been thinking about violence in games for thirty years, if not longer. So if you think some zeitgeist-chasing politician or religious extremist who just started shrieking about the issue last week has any deeper insights than we do... Well, then you may be interested in this bridge I have for sale.
Schwab
P.S: If you're interested in finding out what was so horrific about TARGET, download the Sol-20 emulator and try it yourself:
EX 0
and press Enter. You must enter the command in upper case.
Except that you can't make the assumption that the instruction following the caller is only one byte in size. Hence, my original comment.
Schwab