If you are not doing anything illegal - you have nothing to worry about!
Yeah, because legal systems the world over are infallible and cost defendants nothing to participate in. Especially where large multinational corporations and their pseudo-police are concerned.
Well, for one thing, the model of selling a product doesn't work in the software development industry.
I just heard a thunderclap. I think it was the sound of Bill Gates' bank account entering the atmosphere of your argument. I estimate about five minutes until it re-enacts the scene from the end of The Forge of God when it meets up with Scott McNealy's.
That said, what in the hell do you need an assault rifle for? Most the anti-gun people are after the insane automatic high-power weapons.
IMO, it's dumb to go after assault rifles. How many crimes are committed with them vs. handguns? It's not like you can hide an AK-47 in your waistband.
I am liberal on a lot of issues, but I think trying to keep firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens is wrong. That's all that guns laws do, because criminals will always ignore them.
If you don't believe me, try living in Canada for a few years. I went to university there, and there was a HUGE problem with "home invasions," where a few thugs with a handgun would force their way into a home, tie up the residents at gunpoint, take what they wanted, and leave. By comparison, how often does that happen in the US, where the robbers know that the residents might actually have weapons for protection?
So, I think you're comparing apples-to-oranges when you say, "Even Babylon 5 didn't inspire loyalty on the same level".
What I was thinking of is when B5 was going to be cancelled at the end of Season 4. People wrote letters and so forth, but they didn't pay for their own ads. IMO the only reason it ended up getting the final season was that Ted Turner liked it.
Seriously, has *any* series ever gotten this kind of rabid support? Even Babylon 5 didn't inspire loyalty on the same level.
Since I don't have cable, I never saw FarScape, but any marketing department in their right mind would kill to have fans so willing to spend their money on a given product that they'd pay for their own ads to be aired.
If SciFi was concerned about profitability, they should have started cranking out the merchandise, because this is a bunch of people who are obviously willing to put their money where their mouths are.
And given the recent "success" of Armadillo Aerospace, I'd be a little hesitant to fund a private space program, especially with live people on board.
You know, I wish people would quit harping about that. Do you think NASA just started building flawlessly-operating Saturn Vs from scratch back in the 60s?
How about Star Trek? There's probably room for an MMORPG there.
Trek was originally part of my triad of ultimate MMORPG licenses, but I realized that there would be a huge liability - no matter *how* the game worked, there would be masses of people complaining that it didn't follow the canon for one reason or another.
Fantasies can bend the rules, because the mindset of the fans is different. You can't go out and buy "The Knights Who Say 'Ni!''s Guide to the Holy Hand Grenade," with diagrams and pseudo-physics that "explain" the whole thing.
The Star Wars Writer Conglomerate has dabbled in this recently, but IMO it's not part of the core experience like it is with Trek.
Personally, I'm not into online gaming at all. I'm just a bit jealous of the cash that Sony and LucasArts are going to rake in with this product =).
This is probably the ultimate MMORPG license. Unless someone comes out with one based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I'm sure Sony and LucasArts will have cornered the market.
everybody that is going to use mass-transit is already using mass transit.
No, they're not. There are traffic jams every time there is a game at either of the stadiums. Compare this to Vancouver, BC (where I also lived), where *masses* of people take the Skytrain to theirs, and traffic is significantly less-congested. That's going to be a huge advantage all on its own, IMO.
Also, I personally know that as soon as I can afford to, I'm never going to ride the bus again. They're filthy, they're slow, they're scheduled too infrequently, and they're overcrowded. None of those are a problem with a well-designed monorail/elevated train system.
The monorail is going to be the best thing to happen to Seattle transit in my lifetime. If we can manage to get a viaduct-replacing tunnel as well, this will be a really great city.
Ever heard of NTSC and PAL, pal? When the world can decide on one TV standard you'll see region free consoles games.
The video output type has nothing to do with whether a game from another country will run on a given system or not. European Amigas and Sega Genesises can play US games just fine - and vice versa - for example. The only issue that can occur is that if the European version of the game uses the bottom 40-odd lines of vertical resolution, which is of course cropped off on NTSC displays.
This is one sentiment I can agree with. I never play games online anymore, because at least 3/4 of the people I ended up playing against were using one or more hacks to cheat.
I imagine that MS is going to be very dependent on the fees for online gaming in order to turn a real profit in the long run with the XBox. If the PC experience repeats itself on their console, IMO the users will drop like flies, and they will be back in the hole.
MS does do things I don't like, but this isn't one of them.
20 something American saw cool lifestyle portrayed in T.V. add - now pissed that reality is not the same.
Uh, that just applies to ads for broadband, right? I have big plans for the chicks in bikinis that are going to show up when I crack open a cold case of beer this Friday.
In other words, even though there are thousands, if not millions of possible combinations, none are good enough for you.
The key concept here is combinations. I don't mind tweaking a few settings to get an interface I like, but I don't have the patience to track a bunch of different components down and put them together to get something that's intuitive and pleasing for me to look at, and then have to set those components up on every machine I use.
Like many other aspects of Linux, I *love* the idea of being able to customize it extensively. OTOH, I don't want to be *forced* to. AmigaOS, every version of Windows since 95, MacOS - all of these have nice-looking GUIs right out of the box. I don't think it's asking a lot for the same from X.
*That* is why when I saw the screenshots of PicoGUI, I thought "hey, if Linux had an interface like that, I would be a lot more likely to use it since it looks nice and I know where everything is on that screen."
You obviously think I'm just doing this to be a jerk, though, so I guess I'll stop trying to explain my line of thinking.
...which this one does too, in addition to consuming approximately 1.57 megawatts of power =). Seriously, I think that NVidia has learned from the mistakes of 3Dfx. They've squeezed what they can from the GF4 line, and rather than just clock it higher or put two GPUs on a single board, they're putting out something new. Even the GF4 series incorporated similar technology to the Kyro chips, so I'm sure this will be even better. The main issue I see with strategies like the Kyro is that rather than using their technology to outpace the leaders, the manufacturers use it to build cards that are roughly equivalent to the midrange of their competitors but that cost less. If they did build high-end consumer cards, they would probably end up with crazy cooling systems too. I would bet that the mid- and low- end of this new series will not have such extreme cooling apparati. NVidia knows that dorky performance freaks* are willing to put up with things like dual-slot-occupying blowers to get as much power as possible, but I'm sure they also realize that not everyone is like that.
* No offense to dorky performance geeks, of which I am one sometimes.
It seems that the latest GPU's from both major manufacturers are favoring a brute force approach to performance, rather than improving their architecture.
Did you read the article? The NV30 is a completely different design than previous GeForces.
The simple fact of the matter is, if you haven't found something you like that sits on top of X, you simply never looked.
That's actually not true. The first time I used X was about twelve years ago. Since then I've tried it with all kinds of window managers on top - Gnome, KDE, IceWM, etc. Although there were some aspects of them that I liked, the interface in general just never felt right to me.
Maybe I'm blaming the wrong layer of the interface, but like I said in my original post it's something that has effected every system running X I've used in my life.
This is hearsay, but I think that Lucas very carefully goes over the details of anything Star Wars to make sure the details are consistent with the rest of the universe before it gets the official seal of approval.
Haha, I seriously hope you were joking.
If not, have a look at The Star Wars Holiday Special, novels like The Crystal Star, or pretty much any of the videogames to see any number of contradictions and alterations.
IMO, the only detail anyone at Lucasfilm is concerned with re: spinoff products are the royalty fees.
Why not use a large lcd screen, a compact flash (or similar) HD, 128mb or so ram, and a small processor, and a PXE (network) boot over the 802.11 connection?
Are you going to buy all of those components seperately and duct-tape them together to make a single unit? Part of the reason this idea is so cool is that it's a small form-factor portable interface. That aspect is totally negated if you have to lug around more than one component, or a small PC case strapped to an LCD panel.
The only alternative I can see is a Tablet PC, which costs more than this Mira display.
This device isn't revolutionary, since it builds on existing technology. OTOH, it's still really neat. If I made the kind of money that the people it's directed at (currently) do, I would snap one up. I would love to be able to read the news online, check email, etc., from the table at breakfast... assuming I had the space for a dining room table. Again, this is currently priced for people with a decent chunk of change to spend on luxury computing hardware.
I think it's a totally smart move on the part of MS, Viewsonic, etc. Kubrick knew we'd be using this kind of thing while we ate back when he made 2001. We're just a year or two overdue.
X - and the rest of the GUI - is one of the main things keeping me from using *ix on my desktop.
The idea of it being a server is really cool, but I have never seen X running with any window manager that I liked the looks of enough to use on a daily basis.
I can learn to use pretty much any interface - I even have to deal with OS/390s every once in awhile. But on my desktop, I'll only use one that I find intuitive and elegant. X is neither to me.
If PicoGUI is as good as the screenshots on their site make it look, IMO the Linux community would be wise to integrate it into some (or all) of the standard distributions. A polished, intuitive, and pretty GUI is one of the best ways to win people over, and keep them once they're there.
If there is anything disturbing about this it's that such useful critters needed to be destroyed.
I agree that it's sad when living things need to be killed, but on the other hand I can sympathize with the ant-infested person as well.
While I've never had any computer hardware turned into an insect nest, one of the apartments I lived in while I was going to university did, and it was horrible. One or two ants are cool to watch. A whole river of them moving across your kitchen floor 24x7 is not. It's an invasion of your space, and there's nothing you can do to reason with them or control them other than to wipe them out. I tried all of the regular hippie ant-genocide-less tricks, and nothing worked. Hundreds and hundreds of them kept coming. That's what's gross - seeing a living alien mass take over something you use on a regular basis. I'd feel the same way if I discovered a bunch of mold stalactites in my fridge.
In the end, the only way I was able to get them out of my kitchen was with a couple of the traps that contaminate the worker ants with poison that they take back to the queen, which kills her off and stops the population production.
It's always been the applications that have driven things. Still the same today.
Exactly. One-third* of the reason I run Windows is that it lets me use applications like Cakewalk Sonar and Photoshop. Sonar is the *only* MIDI/DA sequencer still on the market that I really like, so even OS X is not an option for me.
I predict that it will be a *long* time (if ever) before the majority of musicians would feel comfortable running Linux on their studio computers. There just aren't the apps, or the hardware support.
* The other two thirds are "I can't play all of the games I want to play," and "I just don't find any of the available ways of configuring X to be intuitive for me as a GUI."
Re:You bring up a good point...
on
MAME To Become GPL?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Then it occurred to me that I SHOULD be able to play the PC version, as it is essentially (but not literally) the same intellectual property as the PS2 game, which I own (or have purchased the right to play).
I would buy this if you were talking about having a tape copy of a DVD you own, because the film only gets made once.
However, the same game for different consoles means spending development time on all of the versions. They're the same game, but different products.
They're the kind of people that glittery casemods attract
I like well-done case mods because they look interesting and are an expression of the owner. I built my current PC with a Lucite case and dual blacklight neon tubes for that very reason. It's more fun to have a glowing clear box on my desk than my old beige case.
Does that mean I'm not also interested in physics and politics? No. But wait, I also run an M$ OS at home, so I must be a "nu-geek" even though I've been using computers since I was six*.
Not liking a particular type of article on Slashdot isn't something to have a heart attack over. It's easy enough to ignore the ones you're not interested in. I do it all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are not doing anything illegal - you have nothing to worry about!
Yeah, because legal systems the world over are infallible and cost defendants nothing to participate in. Especially where large multinational corporations and their pseudo-police are concerned.
Well, for one thing, the model of selling a product doesn't work in the software development industry.
I just heard a thunderclap. I think it was the sound of Bill Gates' bank account entering the atmosphere of your argument. I estimate about five minutes until it re-enacts the scene from the end of The Forge of God when it meets up with Scott McNealy's.
That said, what in the hell do you need an assault rifle for? Most the anti-gun people are after the insane automatic high-power weapons.
IMO, it's dumb to go after assault rifles. How many crimes are committed with them vs. handguns? It's not like you can hide an AK-47 in your waistband.
I am liberal on a lot of issues, but I think trying to keep firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens is wrong. That's all that guns laws do, because criminals will always ignore them.
If you don't believe me, try living in Canada for a few years. I went to university there, and there was a HUGE problem with "home invasions," where a few thugs with a handgun would force their way into a home, tie up the residents at gunpoint, take what they wanted, and leave. By comparison, how often does that happen in the US, where the robbers know that the residents might actually have weapons for protection?
So, I think you're comparing apples-to-oranges when you say, "Even Babylon 5 didn't inspire loyalty on the same level".
What I was thinking of is when B5 was going to be cancelled at the end of Season 4. People wrote letters and so forth, but they didn't pay for their own ads. IMO the only reason it ended up getting the final season was that Ted Turner liked it.
Seriously, has *any* series ever gotten this kind of rabid support? Even Babylon 5 didn't inspire loyalty on the same level.
Since I don't have cable, I never saw FarScape, but any marketing department in their right mind would kill to have fans so willing to spend their money on a given product that they'd pay for their own ads to be aired.
If SciFi was concerned about profitability, they should have started cranking out the merchandise, because this is a bunch of people who are obviously willing to put their money where their mouths are.
And given the recent "success" of Armadillo Aerospace, I'd be a little hesitant to fund a private space program, especially with live people on board.
You know, I wish people would quit harping about that. Do you think NASA just started building flawlessly-operating Saturn Vs from scratch back in the 60s?
How about Star Trek? There's probably room for an MMORPG there.
Trek was originally part of my triad of ultimate MMORPG licenses, but I realized that there would be a huge liability - no matter *how* the game worked, there would be masses of people complaining that it didn't follow the canon for one reason or another.
Fantasies can bend the rules, because the mindset of the fans is different. You can't go out and buy "The Knights Who Say 'Ni!''s Guide to the Holy Hand Grenade," with diagrams and pseudo-physics that "explain" the whole thing.
The Star Wars Writer Conglomerate has dabbled in this recently, but IMO it's not part of the core experience like it is with Trek.
Personally, I'm not into online gaming at all. I'm just a bit jealous of the cash that Sony and LucasArts are going to rake in with this product =).
This is probably the ultimate MMORPG license. Unless someone comes out with one based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I'm sure Sony and LucasArts will have cornered the market.
everybody that is going to use mass-transit is already using mass transit.
No, they're not. There are traffic jams every time there is a game at either of the stadiums. Compare this to Vancouver, BC (where I also lived), where *masses* of people take the Skytrain to theirs, and traffic is significantly less-congested. That's going to be a huge advantage all on its own, IMO.
Also, I personally know that as soon as I can afford to, I'm never going to ride the bus again. They're filthy, they're slow, they're scheduled too infrequently, and they're overcrowded. None of those are a problem with a well-designed monorail/elevated train system.
The monorail is going to be the best thing to happen to Seattle transit in my lifetime. If we can manage to get a viaduct-replacing tunnel as well, this will be a really great city.
Ever heard of NTSC and PAL, pal? When the world can decide on one TV standard you'll see region free consoles games.
The video output type has nothing to do with whether a game from another country will run on a given system or not. European Amigas and Sega Genesises can play US games just fine - and vice versa - for example. The only issue that can occur is that if the European version of the game uses the bottom 40-odd lines of vertical resolution, which is of course cropped off on NTSC displays.
i'm sick of playing against cheaters on the PC
This is one sentiment I can agree with. I never play games online anymore, because at least 3/4 of the people I ended up playing against were using one or more hacks to cheat.
I imagine that MS is going to be very dependent on the fees for online gaming in order to turn a real profit in the long run with the XBox. If the PC experience repeats itself on their console, IMO the users will drop like flies, and they will be back in the hole.
MS does do things I don't like, but this isn't one of them.
20 something American saw cool lifestyle portrayed in T.V. add - now pissed that reality is not the same.
Uh, that just applies to ads for broadband, right? I have big plans for the chicks in bikinis that are going to show up when I crack open a cold case of beer this Friday.
If you were a fan, check out pandemic's battle zone II
The first one in the series was excellent. I snagged the Gold Edition which came with a really well-done (but &#$#&#@ *hard*) expansion pack.
II is sitting on my shelf waiting to be tried out. I heard it was not as good.
It's too bad this kind of game never seemed to catch on. Sacrifice was the same basic style, and that didn't do too well either.
In other words, even though there are thousands, if not millions of possible combinations, none are good enough for you.
The key concept here is combinations. I don't mind tweaking a few settings to get an interface I like, but I don't have the patience to track a bunch of different components down and put them together to get something that's intuitive and pleasing for me to look at, and then have to set those components up on every machine I use.
Like many other aspects of Linux, I *love* the idea of being able to customize it extensively. OTOH, I don't want to be *forced* to. AmigaOS, every version of Windows since 95, MacOS - all of these have nice-looking GUIs right out of the box. I don't think it's asking a lot for the same from X.
*That* is why when I saw the screenshots of PicoGUI, I thought "hey, if Linux had an interface like that, I would be a lot more likely to use it since it looks nice and I know where everything is on that screen."
You obviously think I'm just doing this to be a jerk, though, so I guess I'll stop trying to explain my line of thinking.
...which this one does too, in addition to consuming approximately 1.57 megawatts of power =).
Seriously, I think that NVidia has learned from the mistakes of 3Dfx. They've squeezed what they can from the GF4 line, and rather than just clock it higher or put two GPUs on a single board, they're putting out something new. Even the GF4 series incorporated similar technology to the Kyro chips, so I'm sure this will be even better. The main issue I see with strategies like the Kyro is that rather than using their technology to outpace the leaders, the manufacturers use it to build cards that are roughly equivalent to the midrange of their competitors but that cost less. If they did build high-end consumer cards, they would probably end up with crazy cooling systems too.
I would bet that the mid- and low- end of this new series will not have such extreme cooling apparati. NVidia knows that dorky performance freaks* are willing to put up with things like dual-slot-occupying blowers to get as much power as possible, but I'm sure they also realize that not everyone is like that.
* No offense to dorky performance geeks, of which I am one sometimes.
It seems that the latest GPU's from both major manufacturers are favoring a brute force approach to performance, rather than improving their architecture.
Did you read the article? The NV30 is a completely different design than previous GeForces.
The simple fact of the matter is, if you haven't found something you like that sits on top of X, you simply never looked.
That's actually not true. The first time I used X was about twelve years ago. Since then I've tried it with all kinds of window managers on top - Gnome, KDE, IceWM, etc. Although there were some aspects of them that I liked, the interface in general just never felt right to me.
Maybe I'm blaming the wrong layer of the interface, but like I said in my original post it's something that has effected every system running X I've used in my life.
This is hearsay, but I think that Lucas very carefully goes over the details of anything Star Wars to make sure the details are consistent with the rest of the universe before it gets the official seal of approval.
Haha, I seriously hope you were joking.
If not, have a look at The Star Wars Holiday Special, novels like The Crystal Star, or pretty much any of the videogames to see any number of contradictions and alterations.
IMO, the only detail anyone at Lucasfilm is concerned with re: spinoff products are the royalty fees.
Why not use a large lcd screen, a compact flash (or similar) HD, 128mb or so ram, and a small processor, and a PXE (network) boot over the 802.11 connection?
Are you going to buy all of those components seperately and duct-tape them together to make a single unit? Part of the reason this idea is so cool is that it's a small form-factor portable interface. That aspect is totally negated if you have to lug around more than one component, or a small PC case strapped to an LCD panel.
The only alternative I can see is a Tablet PC, which costs more than this Mira display.
This device isn't revolutionary, since it builds on existing technology. OTOH, it's still really neat. If I made the kind of money that the people it's directed at (currently) do, I would snap one up. I would love to be able to read the news online, check email, etc., from the table at breakfast... assuming I had the space for a dining room table. Again, this is currently priced for people with a decent chunk of change to spend on luxury computing hardware.
I think it's a totally smart move on the part of MS, Viewsonic, etc. Kubrick knew we'd be using this kind of thing while we ate back when he made 2001. We're just a year or two overdue.
I don't understand those who *HATE* X.
X - and the rest of the GUI - is one of the main things keeping me from using *ix on my desktop.
The idea of it being a server is really cool, but I have never seen X running with any window manager that I liked the looks of enough to use on a daily basis.
I can learn to use pretty much any interface - I even have to deal with OS/390s every once in awhile. But on my desktop, I'll only use one that I find intuitive and elegant. X is neither to me.
If PicoGUI is as good as the screenshots on their site make it look, IMO the Linux community would be wise to integrate it into some (or all) of the standard distributions. A polished, intuitive, and pretty GUI is one of the best ways to win people over, and keep them once they're there.
If there is anything disturbing about this it's that such useful critters needed to be destroyed.
I agree that it's sad when living things need to be killed, but on the other hand I can sympathize with the ant-infested person as well.
While I've never had any computer hardware turned into an insect nest, one of the apartments I lived in while I was going to university did, and it was horrible. One or two ants are cool to watch. A whole river of them moving across your kitchen floor 24x7 is not. It's an invasion of your space, and there's nothing you can do to reason with them or control them other than to wipe them out. I tried all of the regular hippie ant-genocide-less tricks, and nothing worked. Hundreds and hundreds of them kept coming. That's what's gross - seeing a living alien mass take over something you use on a regular basis. I'd feel the same way if I discovered a bunch of mold stalactites in my fridge.
In the end, the only way I was able to get them out of my kitchen was with a couple of the traps that contaminate the worker ants with poison that they take back to the queen, which kills her off and stops the population production.
It's always been the applications that have driven things. Still the same today.
Exactly. One-third* of the reason I run Windows is that it lets me use applications like Cakewalk Sonar and Photoshop. Sonar is the *only* MIDI/DA sequencer still on the market that I really like, so even OS X is not an option for me.
I predict that it will be a *long* time (if ever) before the majority of musicians would feel comfortable running Linux on their studio computers. There just aren't the apps, or the hardware support.
* The other two thirds are "I can't play all of the games I want to play," and "I just don't find any of the available ways of configuring X to be intuitive for me as a GUI."
Then it occurred to me that I SHOULD be able to play the PC version, as it is essentially (but not literally) the same intellectual property as the PS2 game, which I own (or have purchased the right to play).
I would buy this if you were talking about having a tape copy of a DVD you own, because the film only gets made once.
However, the same game for different consoles means spending development time on all of the versions. They're the same game, but different products.
They're the kind of people that glittery casemods attract
I like well-done case mods because they look interesting and are an expression of the owner. I built my current PC with a Lucite case and dual blacklight neon tubes for that very reason. It's more fun to have a glowing clear box on my desk than my old beige case.
Does that mean I'm not also interested in physics and politics? No. But wait, I also run an M$ OS at home, so I must be a "nu-geek" even though I've been using computers since I was six*.
Not liking a particular type of article on Slashdot isn't something to have a heart attack over. It's easy enough to ignore the ones you're not interested in. I do it all the time.
* Apple IIe Forever!
Do you have a better plan for getting through the ice on Europa?