What the hell are you talking about? Can you back your bullshit up with a fact or two?
Click here to read the MSDS for pure amorphous silicon. The only thing that is even remotely dangerous is the powder, and that's true for damn near any substance. Can you tell me what's anything toxic about silicon?
Also, next time, be prepared to cough up some facts before posting what you know is bullshit.
If you're concerned that the religious zealots who shop at that place can actually appreciate art, they can't. No person who doesn't have severe brain damage/atrophy would buy something from them. So I wouldn't be too concerned about their paws actually touching good movies. Besides, nobody has to actually buy stuff from them.
My point was that the DGA is being hypocritical, not that whatever those CleanFlicks weirdos are doing is right. I just think that if they object to their films being edited by 3rd parties, they might as well object to them being censored by the studios themselves. Which they don't.
OK, but I still fail to see your point. The thing you're saying is that Winex will make games run so well on Linux that nobody will bother making native titles.
What is wrong with that? If Windows games under WineX are be truly indistinguishable from native Linux games, what is the problem? Microsoft doesn't profit or lose just because someone makes or doesn't make a game for their API (nobody will quit making games for Windows even if Linux gets the majority of the desktop market). If these games run as well as native titles do, what is the difference?
The obvious arguments against this are "windows games suck", "windows crashes all the time", "windows is not as fast", "wine will always suck", "wine won't run as fast as windows", etc. The reason you haven't said that in the first place is because that renders your original point invalid. If wine-emulated games are inferior to native titles, people will prefer native games. Companies will start making native games as soon as there is a large enough user base. They don't just look at the number of people buying the games (if you don't have any Linux titles, how do you know who will buy them?), they look at consumer demand. When Linux gains a significant percentage of the desktop market, the cries for native ports will be far more louder, and companies will start making native ports.
The other point is that people like you assume that Windows users will magically convert to Linux. That is a myth. Unless Linux starts offering some serious advantages (the ability to run your old Windows programs and games while being faster and more stable), nobody will bother converting. The linux user base will stop growing, and it will eventually die out just like OS/2 and countless others did.
Finally, I'll just cover the OS/2 argument that people like you love to use. OS/2 did not die from windows compatibility, it died from the lack of it (and the stupidity of IBM). OS/2 was compatible only with Win16 (IBM licensed it from MS), and until the time that Win32 was released, it was growing in popularity. When Win32 came out, OS/2 died because it couldn't run the latest applications. Wine is not susceptible to API changes like this, because it doesn't use code from Microsoft.
Also, it surprises me that people like you don't see why Microsoft's software is so popular. The reason is backwards compatibility. Win95 could run nearly all Win3.11, Win95 and DOS programs when it was introduced (and had zero market share). Did that keep people from making Win95 programs and choosing to make DOS ones instead? Hell no. Was it one of the reasons people bought Win95 in droves? Hell yes.
Remember, anti-wine advocates: wine bashing is essentially shooting Linux in the foot. Wine is the only hope for Linux on the desktop, and without it nobody will ever make native Linux applications and very few users will use Linux. Just like what is happening right now with OS/2. A few geeks still use that OS, even though no new programs came out for it since 1994. Almost nobody else has even thought of using it.
I think I'll make a website soon that discusses this stuff in detail. Reposting this everywhere gets very annoying.
And some directors don't want things they've created to be completely distorted by someone else without their knowledge and/or permission.
Riiight. If that was true, how come do cable networks randomly cut scenes and censor movies all the time? I can assure you that the movie directors didn't agree to those changes. The movie director has no more rights to a movie than an artist does to their music. The studio decides those things. In this case, the motive is money. In any case, most Hollywood movies (with VERY few exceptions) are not art, but are much rather entertainment devices, designed primarily for making money. Therefore, any argument about what the work was "intended" for is bullshit. And in any case, people have the ultimate right of deciding what to watch. If that wasn't true, we wouldn't have fast forward buttons on our VCRs and mute buttons on our TVs.
In a statement, the Directors Guild of America said Thursday: "Perhaps they are unaware that the United States Constitution directed Congress to pass laws to ensure that the creators of original works had the 'exclusive right' to their work and prohibited their unauthorized exploitation by others for financial gain."
If it was actually illegal, the CleanFlicks place would have had their asses sued off by now. The truth is, creators of the work don't have any rights to it in 99% of the cases. If you write a book, you transfer the copyright to the publisher, and after that you don't have any rights to the book. If you make a movie, the studio gets the copyright, and the director does not have any rights to the movie. The only ones who have legal options in this situation are the studios. They shouldn't care too much, because they only get more sales from this, and the copyright isn't really being violated.
Drop that stupid "movie directors know best" attitude. The only thing they do is direct the movie. The people who provide the money for the movie are the ones who determine what the movie will be like and what scenes will be included. If they don't like a scene, and the director does, too bad for the director. If they want more bad language, and the director doesn't, too bad for the director. The DGA doesn't mention that, does it?
Since both silicon and boron are toxins, by definition any production process that uses them is going to generate toxic wastes.
This sentence qualifies for the most idiotic statement of the year award. Either you are a retarded monkey, a troll, or still in 9th grade and haven't yet taken a chemistry class.
Boron is a metal. It's no more harmful than, say, iron. It's definitely not toxic. And if you think silicon is toxic, you better not drink out of glass or ceramic containers and not go near a beach. Silicon is the main component of glass, ceramics, and sand. It is one of the most widespread substances on earth.
The publisher sure is going to give a shit that 6 people bought the Linux version of a game. Just look at it this way: until there are applications (Office) and games on Linux, hardly anyone will consider switching from Windows. The publisher won't publish a game even if it knows 1000 people will buy it. Just look at the numbers:
$30/game x 1000 games sold = $30,000
That's hardly enough to pay a single programmer's salary for half a year. Yet porting the game takes half a year even with several programmers working on it. And you can hardly expect 1000 copies to be sold even for a popular game if it's even slightly late. Look at the numbers from Loki (linux and main did an article a while ago).
Use your brains. The reason there will be no native Linux games in the near future is because there are not enough people using Linux to justify spending money on a port. Hardly anyone wants year-old games, even if they are native. Basically, there is no market for ports.
It's a gift. But in all seriousness, slashdot is starting to piss me off. For every person who has a clue, there are about a hundred who don't (and are far more vocal). Unfortunately, judging by little stupid remarks at the end of most stories, most of the editors belong to the group that doesn't have a clue.
It also does that in a room, to some extent. In good auditoriums, there are special sound-absorbing things everywhere to improve the acoustics, though. Echoes don't exactly improve the sound.
Read the newsgroups. Also read the 'good sound for cheap' site (use google). Don't buy the overpriced surround crap unless you mostly watch movies and don't really care about music quality.
High quality audio is not surround sound. Nobody listens to music on a surround sound rig and expects quality. Surround sound is good for movies, where you don't need good fidelity, but most surround sound systems suck if you're trying to listen to music. Audiophiles don't like subwoofer-satellite systems (because it's a cost-saving compromise that causes lots of problems), and a high-quality surround-sound system with 5 real high-end speakers and amplifiers would be prohibitively expensive ($20,000+). Anything cheaper, and it sounds like crap, because it's low-end.
Besides, when you're at a concert, you don't sit in the middle of the stage, so the only source of sound is from the front. That would mean that there is exactly no point in recording surround-sound audio CDs. It's a marketing measure, if anything.
And to the poor shmucks who listen to music on a satellite-subwoofer combo: I hope you don't ever come near a high-end audio system. If you do, you will probably realize that your system totally sucks, and will have to replace at least two of those speakers (and probably the amp). There is quite a bit of very tangible difference. Sort of like the difference between a 128k MP3 and the real uncompressed file.
Well, you don't have to wait for the tests. Everyone with any knowledge of audio will agree that CDs are a poor format. Crappy error-correction, only 16-bit precision (20 is optimal), and a relatively low sampling rate are all problems. Guess why audiophiles mostly listen to vinyl. Of course, the 2.8 MHz sampling rate is ridiculous (24bit/96KHz is more than enough for almost anything), but you have to fill the disc somehow...
On the other hand, I doubt that many consumers will be able to tell the difference between CDs and SACDs. You really need good equipment for that. I mean good audiophile-type equipment, not Sony surround-sound crap (rule of thumb: if it's surround sound or has more than 2 LEDs, it's not audiophile equipment and it doesn't produce good sound). I highly doubt they'll pay $250+ to replace their existing CD players, and I also doubt that people will buy CDs that are incompatible with their portable players, existing players, boomboxes, car players, etc. Regular CDs are more than satisfactory for that. And as long as we have hybrid CDs (forever, most likely - people won't upgrade and won't buy SACD-only discs) we won't have problems copying them.
2000 copies @ 30/copy - $15 license fees (just a guess) = 30,000 bucks. Given that it maybe took two part-time programmers two months to patch up WineX to run this, it's not exactly bad.
The good thing about Wine is that you don't need to remake the game, just fix the bugs and add missing features. When you have the source code, it's even easier. And, the efforts put into developing winex eventually pay off (when you can run almost every game without extra work), so TG actually has a chance of becoming profitable (unlike Loki). This also means that you can release ports at essentially the same time as the games.
While some people here think that we should exaggerate the dangers of DMCA to make it look worse than it is, I disagree. When you exaggerate, people familiar with the actual law (such as lawmakers) can see that, and you immediately discredit yourself. Highlighting the actual problems with the law makes your point valid; exaggerating facts makes your entire point invalid. Any intelligent person saw that Edward Felten would not have been prosecuted for the SDMI fiasco, for obvious reasons. Why did the EFF stretch the facts and say that he would? By doing that, they only discredited their other, valid points.
People can own fonts just like they can own computer programs. Truetype fonts are bytecode programs that draw a symbol with given characteristics (point size, etc). They can be quite complex. They seem trivial, but creating a good-looking font takes a LOT of effort. If you don't believe me, try drawing a font (even if it's based on a public-domain typeface) that looks consistent, has good kerning, has good hinting, and that you can scale down to 8 pixels while making it still look good and retain its main characteristics.
Typefaces may not be copyrightable, but computer fonts definitely are, given that they are fairly complicated programs that take a lot of effort to create.
Unlike other things, free fonts that look good on a display are almost impossible to create. They simply will not look nearly as good as the Microsoft fonts.
Typefaces are one of the most difficult things to create: you have to have hundreds of glyphs that have to look consistent, proportional, and pleasing to the eye. You have to get the spacing exactly right, or it will look horrible.
Low-resolution scalable display fonts (like the Microsoft ones) are even more difficult to create. When you have a monitor running at 75 or 100 dpi, you cannot automatically scale vector fonts and have them look good. That's why most type1 fonts look like sh*t on a display even though they were professionally made. Scaling only works on high-resolution output devices: typesetting machines have several thousands dpi of resolution, while monitors have 75 - 100 dpi. The Monotype (the company that made fonts for M$) fonts use special programming (ttf bytecode) to provide low-resolution glyphs. Most font editing programs will erase the bytecode, and the font then looks like crap. Try opening Verdana with FontLab, changing a glyph or two, and saving it. It will then look like sh*t.
Anyway, my point is that font design should be left to the professionals. No amateur designer will be able to make something as good as one of the Microsoft/Monotype fonts. If you want to try anyway, the tool to use is FontLab. It is one of the best font editors out there.
Re:Please enlighten a doofus
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LinuXbox Boots
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· Score: 2, Informative
If simply buying an xbox meant that MS gets to make money off of it even if you put Linux on it, why would they make it so difficult to do that? Hell, sony makes their own Linux distro for the PS2, why couldn't M$ do the same?
There is a metric that says how many games are bought per system sold; that determines how much money is made. If someone uses an xbox as a SNES or an arcade emulator, the number of xbox games bought would probably be around zero. That means microsoft will _LOSE_ money.
Also, the dev kits and licenses do not make money alone. MS gets a cut for every xbox game sold, that's where they make money.
DVD-R will win, because it has almost 100% compatibility with existing DVD players. DVD+R (from what I understand) is not nearly as compatible. Sort of like CD-R versus CD-RW.
What was so good about BeOS? With no applications, and even fewer drivers than Linux, it had no chance. At least Linux is free software - BeOS was not only proprietary but you also had to pay for it (and the free version was about as usable as a Linux rescue floppy). They had some neat technology, but you couldn't use it because it had almost no applications.
OS/2 ran on any x86 platform and OS/2 Boxsets outsold Windows Box sets. Windows won because of the OEM preinstalls. OS/2 was also a more popular Desktop at the Time than Linux is today.
The first part would be correct, if you didn't omit the simple fact that you also need drivers to run an operating system. IBM only made drivers for their own hardware, and almost no other hardware had OS/2 drivers.
Sales of box sets are really irrelevant. Most people buy an OS with their computer.
Windows won because IBM totally farked up their marketing, and not because of anything else. IBM was, at that time, a disjointed company, where the computer division was competing with the OS division and other ridiculous things like that. It's a miracle they survived at all.
Besides, OS/2 is really irrelevant to the WINE argument. OS/2 could run Win16 apps better than Windows 3.1, because they used Microsoft's code (they had a cross-license agreement). Microsoft introduced Win32, and that killed the compatibility. WINE is different. First, it does not rely on M$ code, so the quality of the "emulation" is worse. That also ensures that they can freely implement any new APIs and developments, and that M$ can't choke them off by simply creating a new API.
Finally, what the hell makes you think that OS/2 would have become so popular if it didn't have Windows 3.1 support? WHO THE FUCK WOULD HAVE BOUGHT IT? WHAT FOR?
One final question: who would make software for an OS with almost no user base, such as Linux on the desktop? Just a few F***edCompanies. Do you still think we don't need Wine?
Commodore introduced the C128 that could run Aplications in C128 mode or C64 mode. Allmost no aplications were developed for C128 mode because all the C128 users could run C64 Aplications in C64 mode.
Why is it that I have heard of the C64 but never or C128? Could it be that it was not nearly as popular because it was far more expensive than the C64? Would anyone have bought that machine at all if it wasn't compatible with the C64?
IBM had OS/2 that could run Windows Aplications, and few venders bothered with writting OS/2 native aplications.
And is that what killed OS/2? Could it be that it was actually an unpopular OS that did not want to run on anything except expensive IBM hardware? Could it be that there was no demand for OS/2 native ports because hardly anyone used OS/2? Would anyone have ever used OS/2 if it couldn't run Windows apps? After all, it _still_ has a cult following.
There is little chance that Wine will ever run Windows applications as good as they run on Windows.
Which is exactly why vendors will have to make native versions once enough people switch to Linux.
There is a chance that they will run good enough to give venders an excuse not to bother creating real Linux versions of their software.
10th grade thinking at work. Companies don't determine if they should port something using the number of excuses they can come up with. They determine that by looking at statistics, numbers, and projections. When you have 0 potential users on Linux, you don't get ports. When you have 10,000 users who are using the WINE version and who want a native one, companies will make one.
You might as well argue that because Windows 95 included DOS support, everybody kept making programs for DOS and not a single win32 app was ever made. Yet it's not true. In fact, backwards compatibility is what made people switch to Win95 in the first place.
You can not do it safely without the power company being notified of it. What if someone needs to work on (what they think is) a shut-off power line, and you're feeding power back into it?
The bit about electron pileup is a single most idiotic statement I have ever heard. What the fuck are you talking about?
The reason we use AC instead of DC is because you can use transformers to change the voltage easily. Power is transmitted better at very high voltages because of ohm's law (higher voltage = lower current = less power converted to heat in the wires; heat dissipated equals current times wire resistance).
It is very difficult to change DC voltages when you have large currents involved. AC is also more suited to running things like motors (AC induction motors are far better than DC motors - quiet, reliable).
You do realize that these would simply burn off the extra power, much worse than wall warts? If you use a 5V regulator on a 12V bus, you would have to burn off the extra 7V on the regulator. If your device draws half an amp (typical discman), you would waste 3.5W powering a device that uses 2.5W. Not very efficient.
Wall warts are fine, just unplug them when they're not in use. Also, high-quality wall warts (oxymoron, I know) should not waste much power. The power waste is due to eddy currents and other leakage currents within the poorly-made transformer. A good transformer wastes almost no power.
I've been using the CVS version for a while now to run WCIII; it runs at 100% full speed, with nvidia cards you get even faster framerate than on windows. The release is definitely worth it - many fixes, several good games games working in addition to about 80 others that worked previously. You should certainly get a subscription - only $5/month, you get to vote on what they do next, and you get support from the developers.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell are you talking about? Can you back your bullshit up with a fact or two?
Click here to read the MSDS for pure amorphous silicon. The only thing that is even remotely dangerous is the powder, and that's true for damn near any substance. Can you tell me what's anything toxic about silicon?
Also, next time, be prepared to cough up some facts before posting what you know is bullshit.
If you're concerned that the religious zealots who shop at that place can actually appreciate art, they can't. No person who doesn't have severe brain damage/atrophy would buy something from them. So I wouldn't be too concerned about their paws actually touching good movies. Besides, nobody has to actually buy stuff from them.
My point was that the DGA is being hypocritical, not that whatever those CleanFlicks weirdos are doing is right. I just think that if they object to their films being edited by 3rd parties, they might as well object to them being censored by the studios themselves. Which they don't.
OK, but I still fail to see your point. The thing you're saying is that Winex will make games run so well on Linux that nobody will bother making native titles.
What is wrong with that? If Windows games under WineX are be truly indistinguishable from native Linux games, what is the problem? Microsoft doesn't profit or lose just because someone makes or doesn't make a game for their API (nobody will quit making games for Windows even if Linux gets the majority of the desktop market). If these games run as well as native titles do, what is the difference?
The obvious arguments against this are "windows games suck", "windows crashes all the time", "windows is not as fast", "wine will always suck", "wine won't run as fast as windows", etc. The reason you haven't said that in the first place is because that renders your original point invalid. If wine-emulated games are inferior to native titles, people will prefer native games. Companies will start making native games as soon as there is a large enough user base. They don't just look at the number of people buying the games (if you don't have any Linux titles, how do you know who will buy them?), they look at consumer demand. When Linux gains a significant percentage of the desktop market, the cries for native ports will be far more louder, and companies will start making native ports.
The other point is that people like you assume that Windows users will magically convert to Linux. That is a myth. Unless Linux starts offering some serious advantages (the ability to run your old Windows programs and games while being faster and more stable), nobody will bother converting. The linux user base will stop growing, and it will eventually die out just like OS/2 and countless others did.
Finally, I'll just cover the OS/2 argument that people like you love to use. OS/2 did not die from windows compatibility, it died from the lack of it (and the stupidity of IBM). OS/2 was compatible only with Win16 (IBM licensed it from MS), and until the time that Win32 was released, it was growing in popularity. When Win32 came out, OS/2 died because it couldn't run the latest applications. Wine is not susceptible to API changes like this, because it doesn't use code from Microsoft.
Also, it surprises me that people like you don't see why Microsoft's software is so popular. The reason is backwards compatibility. Win95 could run nearly all Win3.11, Win95 and DOS programs when it was introduced (and had zero market share). Did that keep people from making Win95 programs and choosing to make DOS ones instead? Hell no. Was it one of the reasons people bought Win95 in droves? Hell yes.
Remember, anti-wine advocates: wine bashing is essentially shooting Linux in the foot. Wine is the only hope for Linux on the desktop, and without it nobody will ever make native Linux applications and very few users will use Linux. Just like what is happening right now with OS/2. A few geeks still use that OS, even though no new programs came out for it since 1994. Almost nobody else has even thought of using it.
I think I'll make a website soon that discusses this stuff in detail. Reposting this everywhere gets very annoying.
And some directors don't want things they've created to be completely distorted by someone else without their knowledge and/or permission.
Riiight. If that was true, how come do cable networks randomly cut scenes and censor movies all the time? I can assure you that the movie directors didn't agree to those changes. The movie director has no more rights to a movie than an artist does to their music. The studio decides those things. In this case, the motive is money. In any case, most Hollywood movies (with VERY few exceptions) are not art, but are much rather entertainment devices, designed primarily for making money. Therefore, any argument about what the work was "intended" for is bullshit. And in any case, people have the ultimate right of deciding what to watch. If that wasn't true, we wouldn't have fast forward buttons on our VCRs and mute buttons on our TVs.
In a statement, the Directors Guild of America said Thursday: "Perhaps they are unaware that the United States Constitution directed Congress to pass laws to ensure that the creators of original works had the 'exclusive right' to their work and prohibited their unauthorized exploitation by others for financial gain."
If it was actually illegal, the CleanFlicks place would have had their asses sued off by now. The truth is, creators of the work don't have any rights to it in 99% of the cases. If you write a book, you transfer the copyright to the publisher, and after that you don't have any rights to the book. If you make a movie, the studio gets the copyright, and the director does not have any rights to the movie. The only ones who have legal options in this situation are the studios. They shouldn't care too much, because they only get more sales from this, and the copyright isn't really being violated.
Drop that stupid "movie directors know best" attitude. The only thing they do is direct the movie. The people who provide the money for the movie are the ones who determine what the movie will be like and what scenes will be included. If they don't like a scene, and the director does, too bad for the director. If they want more bad language, and the director doesn't, too bad for the director. The DGA doesn't mention that, does it?
Since both silicon and boron are toxins, by definition any production process that uses them is going to generate toxic wastes.
This sentence qualifies for the most idiotic statement of the year award. Either you are a retarded monkey, a troll, or still in 9th grade and haven't yet taken a chemistry class.
Boron is a metal. It's no more harmful than, say, iron. It's definitely not toxic. And if you think silicon is toxic, you better not drink out of glass or ceramic containers and not go near a beach. Silicon is the main component of glass, ceramics, and sand. It is one of the most widespread substances on earth.
So, STFU and read a fucking book.
The publisher sure is going to give a shit that 6 people bought the Linux version of a game. Just look at it this way: until there are applications (Office) and games on Linux, hardly anyone will consider switching from Windows. The publisher won't publish a game even if it knows 1000 people will buy it. Just look at the numbers:
$30/game x 1000 games sold = $30,000
That's hardly enough to pay a single programmer's salary for half a year. Yet porting the game takes half a year even with several programmers working on it. And you can hardly expect 1000 copies to be sold even for a popular game if it's even slightly late. Look at the numbers from Loki (linux and main did an article a while ago).
Use your brains. The reason there will be no native Linux games in the near future is because there are not enough people using Linux to justify spending money on a port. Hardly anyone wants year-old games, even if they are native. Basically, there is no market for ports.
It's a gift. But in all seriousness, slashdot is starting to piss me off. For every person who has a clue, there are about a hundred who don't (and are far more vocal). Unfortunately, judging by little stupid remarks at the end of most stories, most of the editors belong to the group that doesn't have a clue.
It also does that in a room, to some extent. In good auditoriums, there are special sound-absorbing things everywhere to improve the acoustics, though. Echoes don't exactly improve the sound.
Read the newsgroups. Also read the 'good sound for cheap' site (use google). Don't buy the overpriced surround crap unless you mostly watch movies and don't really care about music quality.
High quality audio is not surround sound. Nobody listens to music on a surround sound rig and expects quality. Surround sound is good for movies, where you don't need good fidelity, but most surround sound systems suck if you're trying to listen to music. Audiophiles don't like subwoofer-satellite systems (because it's a cost-saving compromise that causes lots of problems), and a high-quality surround-sound system with 5 real high-end speakers and amplifiers would be prohibitively expensive ($20,000+). Anything cheaper, and it sounds like crap, because it's low-end.
Besides, when you're at a concert, you don't sit in the middle of the stage, so the only source of sound is from the front. That would mean that there is exactly no point in recording surround-sound audio CDs. It's a marketing measure, if anything.
And to the poor shmucks who listen to music on a satellite-subwoofer combo: I hope you don't ever come near a high-end audio system. If you do, you will probably realize that your system totally sucks, and will have to replace at least two of those speakers (and probably the amp). There is quite a bit of very tangible difference. Sort of like the difference between a 128k MP3 and the real uncompressed file.
Well, you don't have to wait for the tests. Everyone with any knowledge of audio will agree that CDs are a poor format. Crappy error-correction, only 16-bit precision (20 is optimal), and a relatively low sampling rate are all problems. Guess why audiophiles mostly listen to vinyl. Of course, the 2.8 MHz sampling rate is ridiculous (24bit/96KHz is more than enough for almost anything), but you have to fill the disc somehow...
On the other hand, I doubt that many consumers will be able to tell the difference between CDs and SACDs. You really need good equipment for that. I mean good audiophile-type equipment, not Sony surround-sound crap (rule of thumb: if it's surround sound or has more than 2 LEDs, it's not audiophile equipment and it doesn't produce good sound). I highly doubt they'll pay $250+ to replace their existing CD players, and I also doubt that people will buy CDs that are incompatible with their portable players, existing players, boomboxes, car players, etc. Regular CDs are more than satisfactory for that. And as long as we have hybrid CDs (forever, most likely - people won't upgrade and won't buy SACD-only discs) we won't have problems copying them.
2000 copies @ 30/copy - $15 license fees (just a guess) = 30,000 bucks. Given that it maybe took two part-time programmers two months to patch up WineX to run this, it's not exactly bad.
The good thing about Wine is that you don't need to remake the game, just fix the bugs and add missing features. When you have the source code, it's even easier. And, the efforts put into developing winex eventually pay off (when you can run almost every game without extra work), so TG actually has a chance of becoming profitable (unlike Loki). This also means that you can release ports at essentially the same time as the games.
While some people here think that we should exaggerate the dangers of DMCA to make it look worse than it is, I disagree. When you exaggerate, people familiar with the actual law (such as lawmakers) can see that, and you immediately discredit yourself. Highlighting the actual problems with the law makes your point valid; exaggerating facts makes your entire point invalid. Any intelligent person saw that Edward Felten would not have been prosecuted for the SDMI fiasco, for obvious reasons. Why did the EFF stretch the facts and say that he would? By doing that, they only discredited their other, valid points.
People can own fonts just like they can own computer programs. Truetype fonts are bytecode programs that draw a symbol with given characteristics (point size, etc). They can be quite complex. They seem trivial, but creating a good-looking font takes a LOT of effort. If you don't believe me, try drawing a font (even if it's based on a public-domain typeface) that looks consistent, has good kerning, has good hinting, and that you can scale down to 8 pixels while making it still look good and retain its main characteristics.
Typefaces may not be copyrightable, but computer fonts definitely are, given that they are fairly complicated programs that take a lot of effort to create.
Unlike other things, free fonts that look good on a display are almost impossible to create. They simply will not look nearly as good as the Microsoft fonts.
Typefaces are one of the most difficult things to create: you have to have hundreds of glyphs that have to look consistent, proportional, and pleasing to the eye. You have to get the spacing exactly right, or it will look horrible.
Low-resolution scalable display fonts (like the Microsoft ones) are even more difficult to create. When you have a monitor running at 75 or 100 dpi, you cannot automatically scale vector fonts and have them look good. That's why most type1 fonts look like sh*t on a display even though they were professionally made. Scaling only works on high-resolution output devices: typesetting machines have several thousands dpi of resolution, while monitors have 75 - 100 dpi. The Monotype (the company that made fonts for M$) fonts use special programming (ttf bytecode) to provide low-resolution glyphs. Most font editing programs will erase the bytecode, and the font then looks like crap. Try opening Verdana with FontLab, changing a glyph or two, and saving it. It will then look like sh*t.
Anyway, my point is that font design should be left to the professionals. No amateur designer will be able to make something as good as one of the Microsoft/Monotype fonts. If you want to try anyway, the tool to use is FontLab. It is one of the best font editors out there.
If simply buying an xbox meant that MS gets to make money off of it even if you put Linux on it, why would they make it so difficult to do that? Hell, sony makes their own Linux distro for the PS2, why couldn't M$ do the same?
There is a metric that says how many games are bought per system sold; that determines how much money is made. If someone uses an xbox as a SNES or an arcade emulator, the number of xbox games bought would probably be around zero. That means microsoft will _LOSE_ money.
Also, the dev kits and licenses do not make money alone. MS gets a cut for every xbox game sold, that's where they make money.
DVD-R will win, because it has almost 100% compatibility with existing DVD players. DVD+R (from what I understand) is not nearly as compatible. Sort of like CD-R versus CD-RW.
What was so good about BeOS? With no applications, and even fewer drivers than Linux, it had no chance. At least Linux is free software - BeOS was not only proprietary but you also had to pay for it (and the free version was about as usable as a Linux rescue floppy). They had some neat technology, but you couldn't use it because it had almost no applications.
OS/2 ran on any x86 platform and OS/2 Boxsets outsold Windows Box sets. Windows won because of the OEM preinstalls. OS/2 was also a more popular Desktop at the Time than Linux is today.
The first part would be correct, if you didn't omit the simple fact that you also need drivers to run an operating system. IBM only made drivers for their own hardware, and almost no other hardware had OS/2 drivers.
Sales of box sets are really irrelevant. Most people buy an OS with their computer.
Windows won because IBM totally farked up their marketing, and not because of anything else. IBM was, at that time, a disjointed company, where the computer division was competing with the OS division and other ridiculous things like that. It's a miracle they survived at all.
Besides, OS/2 is really irrelevant to the WINE argument. OS/2 could run Win16 apps better than Windows 3.1, because they used Microsoft's code (they had a cross-license agreement). Microsoft introduced Win32, and that killed the compatibility. WINE is different. First, it does not rely on M$ code, so the quality of the "emulation" is worse. That also ensures that they can freely implement any new APIs and developments, and that M$ can't choke them off by simply creating a new API.
Finally, what the hell makes you think that OS/2 would have become so popular if it didn't have Windows 3.1 support? WHO THE FUCK WOULD HAVE BOUGHT IT? WHAT FOR?
One final question: who would make software for an OS with almost no user base, such as Linux on the desktop? Just a few F***ed Companies. Do you still think we don't need Wine?
Actually, they're selling it for a _fourth_ of the cost of the PS2. $50 at your local supermarket.
Your examples don't prove your point at all.
Commodore introduced the C128 that could run Aplications in C128 mode or C64 mode. Allmost no aplications were developed for C128 mode because all the C128 users could run C64 Aplications in C64 mode.
Why is it that I have heard of the C64 but never or C128? Could it be that it was not nearly as popular because it was far more expensive than the C64? Would anyone have bought that machine at all if it wasn't compatible with the C64?
IBM had OS/2 that could run Windows Aplications, and few venders bothered with writting OS/2 native aplications.
And is that what killed OS/2? Could it be that it was actually an unpopular OS that did not want to run on anything except expensive IBM hardware? Could it be that there was no demand for OS/2 native ports because hardly anyone used OS/2? Would anyone have ever used OS/2 if it couldn't run Windows apps? After all, it _still_ has a cult following.
There is little chance that Wine will ever run Windows applications as good as they run on Windows.
Which is exactly why vendors will have to make native versions once enough people switch to Linux.
There is a chance that they will run good enough to give venders an excuse not to bother creating real Linux versions of their software.
10th grade thinking at work. Companies don't determine if they should port something using the number of excuses they can come up with. They determine that by looking at statistics, numbers, and projections. When you have 0 potential users on Linux, you don't get ports. When you have 10,000 users who are using the WINE version and who want a native one, companies will make one.
You might as well argue that because Windows 95 included DOS support, everybody kept making programs for DOS and not a single win32 app was ever made. Yet it's not true. In fact, backwards compatibility is what made people switch to Win95 in the first place.
You can not do it safely without the power company being notified of it. What if someone needs to work on (what they think is) a shut-off power line, and you're feeding power back into it?
The bit about electron pileup is a single most idiotic statement I have ever heard. What the fuck are you talking about?
The reason we use AC instead of DC is because you can use transformers to change the voltage easily. Power is transmitted better at very high voltages because of ohm's law (higher voltage = lower current = less power converted to heat in the wires; heat dissipated equals current times wire resistance).
It is very difficult to change DC voltages when you have large currents involved. AC is also more suited to running things like motors (AC induction motors are far better than DC motors - quiet, reliable).
You do realize that these would simply burn off the extra power, much worse than wall warts? If you use a 5V regulator on a 12V bus, you would have to burn off the extra 7V on the regulator. If your device draws half an amp (typical discman), you would waste 3.5W powering a device that uses 2.5W. Not very efficient. Wall warts are fine, just unplug them when they're not in use. Also, high-quality wall warts (oxymoron, I know) should not waste much power. The power waste is due to eddy currents and other leakage currents within the poorly-made transformer. A good transformer wastes almost no power.
I've been using the CVS version for a while now to run WCIII; it runs at 100% full speed, with nvidia cards you get even faster framerate than on windows. The release is definitely worth it - many fixes, several good games games working in addition to about 80 others that worked previously. You should certainly get a subscription - only $5/month, you get to vote on what they do next, and you get support from the developers.