(1) Whosoever publicly defames the President of the Federation, in a meeting or through the dissemination of written material (section 11 (3)) shall be liable to imprisonment from three months to five years.
(2) In less serious cases the court in its discretion may mitigate the sentence (section 49 (2)) unless the conditions of section 188 are met.
(3) The penalty shall be imprisonment from six months to five years if the act constitutes an intentional defamation (section 187) or if the offender by the act intentionally supports efforts against the continued existence of the Federal
Republic of Germany or against its constitutional principles.
(4) The offence may only be prosecuted upon the authorisation of the President of the Federation.
I'm not asking this in a trolling way - where exactly is the innovation here? Are there any F/OSS games (bar Tux Racer...) that aren't merely copies of some proprietary equivalent?
While Free Software isn't exactly innovative, even TuxRacer was inspired by the N64 game 1080, lets not forget that Minecraft didn't exactly spring out of thin air either, it's heavily based on ideas from Infiniminer. True innovation is rather rare and while there do exist some original games, like Liquid War, there aren't many of them.
The reason for that are two fold: First of the "Ideas are cheap" mantra really isn't true, original ideas are rare, original ideas that are actually implementable are really rare and then even having that idea, doesn't give you the ability to communicate it properly. Which brings the second main issue: communication. It's much easier to say "Lets do a Civ clone" and find contributors, then to get contributors on something completely original, especially when it is nowhere near completion, nobody has a clear idea of what it should be like and there isn't something tangible to point at. Establishing a shared vision is hard if all you have is IRC and mailing lists.
it's not really analogous to a pixel (there's a layer of transformations between voxel and screen)
Actually it is. The thing that is often forgot is that pixels also get quite a bit of transformation when going to the screen, they might get scaled, blurred, blended, gamma-corrected and otherwise changed before they appear on the screen. Furthermore, image formats like JPEG don't store real pixels either, they store something that can be unpacked to pixels, but not perfectly some pixels will get changes along the way. A pixel isn't even necessarily a square on the screen, as most scaling algorithm will handle it as a singular sampling point, not an area. One can even apply a texture to a pixel and blend it with neighboring pixels, that's essentially how tilemaps work.
With voxels the situation is of course a little bit complicated, as there is no native way to display 3D data right now, so you can't just "blit" a voxel set into the video memory and have something show up, like you can do with pixels. There are also plenty of different ways of storing and compressing voxels. The underlying principle is however pretty much the same, just now in 3D instead of 2D. Thus if you want to store a 256x256x256 voxel image, you can just take 256 256x256 images and be done.
I dont know that "more story-based games" is a bad thing.
Having more of it isn't a bad thing, having almost only "story-based" games however is. Note "story" is meant here only in the loosest sense, "character driven" games is probably a better term, as it's not the actual story, dialog, cutscenes, etc. that bothers me, but the focus on having the player be associated with playing only a single character and driving him through a predefined narration, even NewSMB and SSB fall into that category. This is quite different from god, strategy or management games where the player might play a country or a company, but not an particular person. Those games aren't about controlling a human-like character, but about controlling a system.
Sports games are one of the exception, as they have no real predefined narration, just a set of rules and a playfield and often the player doesn't even play a character, but the whole team at once. The problem with sport games however is that most of them try to emulate reality, thus limiting creativity quite a bit.
On the PC of course the situation is much less a problem, as you still have big games like The Sims and companies like Paradox, but on the consoles there is a heavy focused on having games driven by characters and story, not systems.
Yes, but on the other side it's hard to ignore that almost everything that isn't a sports game or a music game these days is story driven with little or no replay value. It doesn't matter if it's an FPS, a RPG or a Jump'n Run, you go through a series of predefined level, reach the end and watch the credits. The implementation is different, but the core formula for player progression in all those games is very much the same. God games, management games, strategy games or similar stuff that essentially relies all on their mechanics and provide little or no narrative, just randomly generated scenarios, are extremely rare in the mainstream.
So it's not so much that every game should have replay value, but more that those genres that provide it have shifted away from the mainstream and become very niche. They still exist on the PC, but even there they are mostly done by the smaller publishers.
So long as you can get the absolute reference to the.flv you can download it,
That's why a lot of flash is streamed these days, so you don't have a flv that you can just grab out of your Temp folder. If you know a way to easily and quickly download content directly from say http://www.thedailyshow.com/, let me know, last time I looked, there wasn't any working one on Linux.
Add on to that the fact you can use FRAPS or most other Screen Recorders to capture the video should the stream be encrypted and it doesn't matter either way.
That's complicated and cumbersome, as it it forces you to not use your computer in the mean time or it will run the video. It also forces you to download in real-time, which is the very thing you normally would want to avoid with a download.
Flash is dominant in the video space because it got there first.
Flash wasn't the first, ActiveX and Quicktime where much earlier. Flash won because it was the best and could do things that no other thing could do at the time. Even today HTML5 is still far away from being a fully working Flash replacement. Remember, Flash isn't just video, it's also a pretty damn good game development platform and animation toolkit.
I fear that the only thing that will change with Flash gone is that webpages will switch to ever more obscure Javascript hacks to protect their content from manipulation. A Flash object can easily and comfortably be blocked with Flashbock, some Javascript hackery is far harder to handle.
I have to agree with that. I have been looking for a Podcast player/manager to replace Rhythmbox (very buggy, lacks plenty features, can't stop it from reencoding some tracks when copying to MP3 player,...) and rather shockingly most alternatives where even worse. The most promising alternative so far seems to be Guayadeque, but it's not exactly bug free either and the GUI has written "programmer art" written all over it.
And what's wrong with being a little like Windows95? All I want from my desktop environment is a panel with a task bar and some small icons to start applications, neither Gnome3 nor Unity can handle that and instead do some ugly full screen filling start-menu replacement crap that makes no sense on a large screen.
You can upgrade to 11.04, as it still provides Gnome2, you simply have to switch off Unity at the login screen and it will behave otherwise as usual. For 11.10 there is no way to do that, it doesn't provide Gnome2 and there is no easy way to install it at all. Ubuntu 11.10 still provides the gnome-fallback-session, which is build on Gnome3, but sort of looks like Gnome2, but is kind of broken and buggy, it also doesn't reuse any of your configurations, so you have to start from scratch.
For 11.10 I'd recommend installing xubuntu-session and then using that, the XFCE4 it provides is extremely similar to Gnome2, much more so then Gnome3.
Thus you could cleanly separate different software packages and different versions of the same software, while not having to enlarge your PATH at all.
It only *really* has any impact in package-managed content which *already* is isolated at a layer other than the filesystem.
The problem with package manager is that they just manage the mess, they don't fix it and many problems caused by/bin/lib still exist. Installing different versions of the same package for example is impossible with dpkg.
I don't know why they can't simply let him disable the WiFi since it should be pretty easy to do so
My guess would be that the problem isn't disabling WiFi, but allowing the guards to verify that it stays that way, which is a hell of a lot harder to do. And the difference between console models would also be a problem, while some versions allow you to rip out the WiFi part, others might have it soldered to the motherboard, adding more complications into the mix.
Odd, because I could have sworn I have different versions of several applications installed just fine
Then you obviously have never bothered to actually try that. By far most software has no provisions for installing in a versioned way into the/bin/lib hierachy. You can of course hack them together that way if you have the source, but it's not a standard thing software does. Also uninstalling is real fun when you have a/usr/local where a user just "make install"ed stuff into.
of giving each its own separate bin and lib under its directory in/opt.
Yes, exactly my point. If you want to have it clean, you better avoid the/bin/lib mess.
The main benefit in compression I see isn't in reducing file size, but in increasing access speed. Dealing with source trees for example is extremely slow, they contain plenty of small files and the overhead when traversing them is enormous. They could be much better handled when there would be a way to tell the filesystem that a directory is static and should be compressed. It would also avoid such ugly hackery you will find in Debian and Ubuntu in the form of:/usr/share/doc/*/*.gz
And the sbins keep system binaries that users cannot execute anyway out of the end-user's path,
That's the theory, it has never really been true in practice. On my Ubuntu here the user can execute everything in/sbin/, each file as the x bit set by default. Furthermore, many of the apps in there are actually quite useful for the user. All the mkfs stuff is useful for creating disk images, ifconfig will tell you your IP and so on. Those apps that actually need root permissions will tell the user soon enough.
That said, I am not opposed to a better separation of programs according to functionality, but bin/sbin never seemed all that useful in practice.
Among other things: They force you to splatter files from different pieces of software into the same directory, making it impossible to install different versions of the same application.
I would like to see it done the other way: Never ever delete anything. I'd like to see file systems getting the ability to archive content, so that it can still be retrieved, but doesn't clutter up the current workspace. Today drives are gigantic that one is never ever going to fill them up with regular text documents, considering how much effort gets put into writing these documents it's rather ridiculous how insecurely they are stored, two wrong clicks can destroy days or weeks of work and no current OS has a proper build in versioning/undo system at the file system level.
I'd like to see the filesystem becoming more a permanent log-book of the users activity, saving not only every document version, but essentially every undo-step, every visited webpage and just plain everything the user does. For issues of privacy one could still provide a "wipe" like tool or something similar to Chromes Incognito mode. We have the storage to essentially never lose a file ever again, yet file systems are so primitive that they don't take any benefit of that and data loss is still a regular occurrence.
That doesn't fix the problem. The moment you rename the file the metadata is lost, the moment you copy the file the metadata is lost, etc. That would only preserve the metadata on directory copies.
While MS might do evil things with it, the notion of ownership could actually be quite useful for files. For backup it would for example be great to be able to quickly tell which files on my system are actually written by me, which where automatically created by my computer and which are part of the distribution. Thus I would only need to backup those files that are actually unique, not all the stuff that is trivial to recover from public sources.
It would also make things like Creative Commons easier, as the file itself could track who created it and modified it, so I wouldn't need to manually carry that meta-information which me, which is often easily lost or incomplete when the work of many different people is combined together.
But of course the notion of ownership alone wouldn't be that big an improvement, in a perfect world each file should essentially be a Git-like repository that keeps track of all the changes done to it.
The reason why people stopped bitching about Gnome2 is because most issues people complained about were actual fixed in the month and years down the road, that didn't make them any less annoying when Gnome2 first replaced Gnome1 long before it was ready.
I like usability, but usability doesn't just mean that a dumb user can figure it out, it also means that it gets the job done with the least amount of effort and Unity just doesn't cut it right now. One thing for example really nice in Gnome2 was that i could have multiple panels, spread across different monitors and filled with the apps needed for that monitor. With Unity I can't even move the dock thing, let alone place it on a monitor of my choice. Also starting an app: Yeah, for big applications, having the icon click be turned into a 'switch to already running app' is great, however for terminals is awkward as hell and makes no conceptual sense. That's simply not how you use a terminal and the dock doesn't provide any proper way to change that behavior. Menu on-top, same issue, great when you have a small screen, awful and confusing on a big screen one, especially when an app spawns multiple windows.
There are also very basic issues with Unity, such as: Does it even work? Well, right now with my ATI drivers, no it doesn't. It produces counterless ugly graphic glitches and problems that make it unusable.
I mean in essence I don't even get why Unity exists. Desktop environments are not that complicated, you have buttons to click on stuff and they make windows open, hardly anything has changed with that in 20 years. The thing that makes the environment more usable lies in making it consistent and bug free. Throwing what we have and starting a new doesn't make it better, it just makes it different for being different sake.
Wanna make application installation easier? Don't twiggle with the start menu, fix dpkg and allow me to easily install software from third party sources across distributions and allow me to install multiple versions of the same app.
Slashdot Mirror
In Germany we have this fine law:
So what about?
http://consumerist.com/2007/10/valve-deactivating-customers-who-bought-orange-box-internationally.html
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2007/10/valve-locking-out-user-accounts-for-incorrect-territory.ars
I'm not asking this in a trolling way - where exactly is the innovation here? Are there any F/OSS games (bar Tux Racer...) that aren't merely copies of some proprietary equivalent?
While Free Software isn't exactly innovative, even TuxRacer was inspired by the N64 game 1080, lets not forget that Minecraft didn't exactly spring out of thin air either, it's heavily based on ideas from Infiniminer. True innovation is rather rare and while there do exist some original games, like Liquid War, there aren't many of them.
The reason for that are two fold: First of the "Ideas are cheap" mantra really isn't true, original ideas are rare, original ideas that are actually implementable are really rare and then even having that idea, doesn't give you the ability to communicate it properly. Which brings the second main issue: communication. It's much easier to say "Lets do a Civ clone" and find contributors, then to get contributors on something completely original, especially when it is nowhere near completion, nobody has a clear idea of what it should be like and there isn't something tangible to point at. Establishing a shared vision is hard if all you have is IRC and mailing lists.
it's not really analogous to a pixel (there's a layer of transformations between voxel and screen)
Actually it is. The thing that is often forgot is that pixels also get quite a bit of transformation when going to the screen, they might get scaled, blurred, blended, gamma-corrected and otherwise changed before they appear on the screen. Furthermore, image formats like JPEG don't store real pixels either, they store something that can be unpacked to pixels, but not perfectly some pixels will get changes along the way. A pixel isn't even necessarily a square on the screen, as most scaling algorithm will handle it as a singular sampling point, not an area. One can even apply a texture to a pixel and blend it with neighboring pixels, that's essentially how tilemaps work.
With voxels the situation is of course a little bit complicated, as there is no native way to display 3D data right now, so you can't just "blit" a voxel set into the video memory and have something show up, like you can do with pixels. There are also plenty of different ways of storing and compressing voxels. The underlying principle is however pretty much the same, just now in 3D instead of 2D. Thus if you want to store a 256x256x256 voxel image, you can just take 256 256x256 images and be done.
I dont know that "more story-based games" is a bad thing.
Having more of it isn't a bad thing, having almost only "story-based" games however is. Note "story" is meant here only in the loosest sense, "character driven" games is probably a better term, as it's not the actual story, dialog, cutscenes, etc. that bothers me, but the focus on having the player be associated with playing only a single character and driving him through a predefined narration, even NewSMB and SSB fall into that category. This is quite different from god, strategy or management games where the player might play a country or a company, but not an particular person. Those games aren't about controlling a human-like character, but about controlling a system.
Sports games are one of the exception, as they have no real predefined narration, just a set of rules and a playfield and often the player doesn't even play a character, but the whole team at once. The problem with sport games however is that most of them try to emulate reality, thus limiting creativity quite a bit.
On the PC of course the situation is much less a problem, as you still have big games like The Sims and companies like Paradox, but on the consoles there is a heavy focused on having games driven by characters and story, not systems.
Because replayability isnt the end-all be-all.
Yes, but on the other side it's hard to ignore that almost everything that isn't a sports game or a music game these days is story driven with little or no replay value. It doesn't matter if it's an FPS, a RPG or a Jump'n Run, you go through a series of predefined level, reach the end and watch the credits. The implementation is different, but the core formula for player progression in all those games is very much the same. God games, management games, strategy games or similar stuff that essentially relies all on their mechanics and provide little or no narrative, just randomly generated scenarios, are extremely rare in the mainstream.
So it's not so much that every game should have replay value, but more that those genres that provide it have shifted away from the mainstream and become very niche. They still exist on the PC, but even there they are mostly done by the smaller publishers.
Yep, neat, but not exactly ground breaking. The OLPC had such an application for the last few years.
So long as you can get the absolute reference to the .flv you can download it,
That's why a lot of flash is streamed these days, so you don't have a flv that you can just grab out of your Temp folder. If you know a way to easily and quickly download content directly from say http://www.thedailyshow.com/, let me know, last time I looked, there wasn't any working one on Linux.
Add on to that the fact you can use FRAPS or most other Screen Recorders to capture the video should the stream be encrypted and it doesn't matter either way.
That's complicated and cumbersome, as it it forces you to not use your computer in the mean time or it will run the video. It also forces you to download in real-time, which is the very thing you normally would want to avoid with a download.
Flash is dominant in the video space because it got there first.
Flash wasn't the first, ActiveX and Quicktime where much earlier. Flash won because it was the best and could do things that no other thing could do at the time. Even today HTML5 is still far away from being a fully working Flash replacement. Remember, Flash isn't just video, it's also a pretty damn good game development platform and animation toolkit.
I fear that the only thing that will change with Flash gone is that webpages will switch to ever more obscure Javascript hacks to protect their content from manipulation. A Flash object can easily and comfortably be blocked with Flashbock, some Javascript hackery is far harder to handle.
I have to agree with that. I have been looking for a Podcast player/manager to replace Rhythmbox (very buggy, lacks plenty features, can't stop it from reencoding some tracks when copying to MP3 player, ...) and rather shockingly most alternatives where even worse. The most promising alternative so far seems to be Guayadeque, but it's not exactly bug free either and the GUI has written "programmer art" written all over it.
And what's wrong with being a little like Windows95? All I want from my desktop environment is a panel with a task bar and some small icons to start applications, neither Gnome3 nor Unity can handle that and instead do some ugly full screen filling start-menu replacement crap that makes no sense on a large screen.
You can upgrade to 11.04, as it still provides Gnome2, you simply have to switch off Unity at the login screen and it will behave otherwise as usual. For 11.10 there is no way to do that, it doesn't provide Gnome2 and there is no easy way to install it at all. Ubuntu 11.10 still provides the gnome-fallback-session, which is build on Gnome3, but sort of looks like Gnome2, but is kind of broken and buggy, it also doesn't reuse any of your configurations, so you have to start from scratch.
For 11.10 I'd recommend installing xubuntu-session and then using that, the XFCE4 it provides is extremely similar to Gnome2, much more so then Gnome3.
Yes and by doing that you are completely by passing the global /bin, /lib structure. So how exactly is that an argument for /bin /lib again?
If *every* application has it's own bin dir, your path is an unmanageable mess
Not really, as there are clean and simple workarounds with symlinks:
ln -s /opt/softtware-x.y.z/bin/software /usr/bin/software
Thus you could cleanly separate different software packages and different versions of the same software, while not having to enlarge your PATH at all.
It only *really* has any impact in package-managed content which *already* is isolated at a layer other than the filesystem.
The problem with package manager is that they just manage the mess, they don't fix it and many problems caused by /bin /lib still exist. Installing different versions of the same package for example is impossible with dpkg.
I don't know why they can't simply let him disable the WiFi since it should be pretty easy to do so
My guess would be that the problem isn't disabling WiFi, but allowing the guards to verify that it stays that way, which is a hell of a lot harder to do. And the difference between console models would also be a problem, while some versions allow you to rip out the WiFi part, others might have it soldered to the motherboard, adding more complications into the mix.
Linux has the ability to read/write compressed files directly (zclib?) and doesn't need the filesystems to support this.
Hacking workarounds together at the app level is the problem, not the solution.
Odd, because I could have sworn I have different versions of several applications installed just fine
Then you obviously have never bothered to actually try that. By far most software has no provisions for installing in a versioned way into the /bin /lib hierachy. You can of course hack them together that way if you have the source, but it's not a standard thing software does. Also uninstalling is real fun when you have a /usr/local where a user just "make install"ed stuff into.
of giving each its own separate bin and lib under its directory in /opt.
Yes, exactly my point. If you want to have it clean, you better avoid the /bin /lib mess.
The main benefit in compression I see isn't in reducing file size, but in increasing access speed. Dealing with source trees for example is extremely slow, they contain plenty of small files and the overhead when traversing them is enormous. They could be much better handled when there would be a way to tell the filesystem that a directory is static and should be compressed. It would also avoid such ugly hackery you will find in Debian and Ubuntu in the form of: /usr/share/doc/*/*.gz
And the sbins keep system binaries that users cannot execute anyway out of the end-user's path,
That's the theory, it has never really been true in practice. On my Ubuntu here the user can execute everything in /sbin/, each file as the x bit set by default. Furthermore, many of the apps in there are actually quite useful for the user. All the mkfs stuff is useful for creating disk images, ifconfig will tell you your IP and so on. Those apps that actually need root permissions will tell the user soon enough.
That said, I am not opposed to a better separation of programs according to functionality, but bin/sbin never seemed all that useful in practice.
What's wrong with /bin and /lib ?
Among other things: They force you to splatter files from different pieces of software into the same directory, making it impossible to install different versions of the same application.
I would like to see it done the other way: Never ever delete anything. I'd like to see file systems getting the ability to archive content, so that it can still be retrieved, but doesn't clutter up the current workspace. Today drives are gigantic that one is never ever going to fill them up with regular text documents, considering how much effort gets put into writing these documents it's rather ridiculous how insecurely they are stored, two wrong clicks can destroy days or weeks of work and no current OS has a proper build in versioning/undo system at the file system level.
I'd like to see the filesystem becoming more a permanent log-book of the users activity, saving not only every document version, but essentially every undo-step, every visited webpage and just plain everything the user does. For issues of privacy one could still provide a "wipe" like tool or something similar to Chromes Incognito mode. We have the storage to essentially never lose a file ever again, yet file systems are so primitive that they don't take any benefit of that and data loss is still a regular occurrence.
That doesn't fix the problem. The moment you rename the file the metadata is lost, the moment you copy the file the metadata is lost, etc. That would only preserve the metadata on directory copies.
a) every time I save a file I have to add a whole bunch of metadata to ensure I can find it again.
Your browser has all the metadata it needs and thus could write it automatically, you would only need to supply additional metadata if you want to.
b) what do I do when I need to open the file and the database can't find it for me?
The same thing you do today when you can't remember the name the file is saved under. There is no difference.
While MS might do evil things with it, the notion of ownership could actually be quite useful for files. For backup it would for example be great to be able to quickly tell which files on my system are actually written by me, which where automatically created by my computer and which are part of the distribution. Thus I would only need to backup those files that are actually unique, not all the stuff that is trivial to recover from public sources.
It would also make things like Creative Commons easier, as the file itself could track who created it and modified it, so I wouldn't need to manually carry that meta-information which me, which is often easily lost or incomplete when the work of many different people is combined together.
But of course the notion of ownership alone wouldn't be that big an improvement, in a perfect world each file should essentially be a Git-like repository that keeps track of all the changes done to it.
The reason why people stopped bitching about Gnome2 is because most issues people complained about were actual fixed in the month and years down the road, that didn't make them any less annoying when Gnome2 first replaced Gnome1 long before it was ready.
I like usability, but usability doesn't just mean that a dumb user can figure it out, it also means that it gets the job done with the least amount of effort and Unity just doesn't cut it right now. One thing for example really nice in Gnome2 was that i could have multiple panels, spread across different monitors and filled with the apps needed for that monitor. With Unity I can't even move the dock thing, let alone place it on a monitor of my choice. Also starting an app: Yeah, for big applications, having the icon click be turned into a 'switch to already running app' is great, however for terminals is awkward as hell and makes no conceptual sense. That's simply not how you use a terminal and the dock doesn't provide any proper way to change that behavior. Menu on-top, same issue, great when you have a small screen, awful and confusing on a big screen one, especially when an app spawns multiple windows.
There are also very basic issues with Unity, such as: Does it even work? Well, right now with my ATI drivers, no it doesn't. It produces counterless ugly graphic glitches and problems that make it unusable.
I mean in essence I don't even get why Unity exists. Desktop environments are not that complicated, you have buttons to click on stuff and they make windows open, hardly anything has changed with that in 20 years. The thing that makes the environment more usable lies in making it consistent and bug free. Throwing what we have and starting a new doesn't make it better, it just makes it different for being different sake.
Wanna make application installation easier? Don't twiggle with the start menu, fix dpkg and allow me to easily install software from third party sources across distributions and allow me to install multiple versions of the same app.