I am a huge fan of the eariler Red Storm Rainbow Six and the first couple Ghost recons and their expansion packs. (Recently they've become arcade shoot 'em ups instead of being tactical games) And so I bought a mic for my PS2 thinking that folks would actually use them to communicate and use tactics.
Wrong. All it seems people use them for is just talking crap about each other. I maybe only get to play a couple hours a month anymore and really only want to play co-op missions for fun. It's entertainment. I always run into a few folks there for the same reason, but even more kids that are frankly punks out to diss everyone else and prove to the universe how cool they are.
That and clans. Everyone seems to be talking about this clan or that clan or do you want to join a clan...crap, I want to charge up the hill with people that know a thing or two about fire/movement tactics, and have some fun! I don't care about the inner politics of the gaming community.
I generally use Safari on Mac for most of my websurfing, but sites with invision board and a couple others don't render correctly. Plus if I want to do anything with google documents or pages or any number of their other services, I had to download Firefox. I argue that this is vendor lock in no different than MS or Apple. It may be Free and Opensource, two key buzzwords, but it's still vendor lock in.
With the options of Opera, FF, Safari all out there on various platforms, that's a good thing. There for a while it was shaping up to be a one horse race. So my response is suck it up and produce the better browser that people will want to use.
See, this is not the experience I had when I worked for a small software house several years ago. We seriously looked into porting some of our applications to Linux since we were small players on Windows and there was not a lot to offer in our market on Linux.
So we ported one of our applications to see what the viability would be and offered a free version and a pro version for a fee. I think we maybe sold around a 100 pro copies for Linux out of 6200 downloads, but we ran into a lot of problems. Tech support was a bitch. Now things have improved, but at the time we developed for RH and SuSE, but we got emails with: "This won't work on Slackware, or Debian, or pick your version here." Trying to explain we only supported RH and SuSE only tended to make people mad. That's not to mention the amount of email we got lecturing us why everything should be "free". Now, sure we had clients that paid
The windows version had 11,000 versions and about 3500 users that upgraded to the full version. To put it mildly, the Linux market was too small to make it viable because it consumed at least as much time to answer tech support questions as it did for Windows and the user base was 35x's larger. Eventually someone did develop a small application that did about the same thing as ours for free/oss and we ceased development on linux before the company was bought out and disbanded. We had a better product, but what we found when reading what customers told us (when they did) was they'd take second rate free for Linux over paying for something of quality.
Sorry, that was just the first hand experience I had. Personally I got tired of it and bought a Mac in 2002 and have been on OSX ever sense at home and work. One of my reasonings was, "Hell I can run GIMP and my fav. *iux apss and get Microsoft Office and other commerical software." Now there are folks like you, and me (I'll spend the money if it's worth it), but those numbers in the Linux desktop market are very few and unless it's something special, aren't enough to make it a viable market for many appliactions. Again it's chicken and the egg. More people won't develop Linux until there are more desktop users. And people won't use Linux until theirs more applications for it. That was how it was 5 years ago and it's still that way.
I am not an accountant. I do design work in Video editing and production on a freelance basis. (Actually I specialize in DVD menu titles and other post production work for other small video graphers and take on projects when they get a backlog).
The program works on Mac and is easy to use for me. Now I had accounting with my business degree, which helps, but it's extremely easy to use and my CPA gives me a discount for using it. In fact, I just spent the past two hours catching up on this weeks invoices and payments a project renders.
Quickbooks is great for not so savvy users and those of us who need to spend our time earning money, not spending hours with a ledger. And the discount I get from my CPA for keeping up with Quickbooks more than pays for the software. Also, my business checking and savings accounts work with Quickbooks making it easy for me to spend less time on the books and more time doing work and getting paid.
And if you are an accountant, then you know one of the reasons why it has to update so much is all the damned changes to tax codes, etc. every time you turn around. The number of hours my CPA spends going to IRS classes and reading stacks of changes to tax code and how things can be classified, etc. is insane.
That's not to say that it doesn't have it's drawbacks. If I had employs and had to pay an extra $300 a year to use their payroll services, I might be a little more annoyed. Again, I use it because for me it's the best option. If someone develops a better mousetrap, I'll use it. Until then I'm sticking with what works.
But how many people are going to pay for it on Linux? Sorry, but my experience has been that just about anyone running their business on Linux (that is not a hosting provider or software developer) has some kind thing against spending money on software, especially the closed source stuff.
Quickbook's market are small businesses, people like me. And they either run Windows (mostly), or Mac(in my case). There might be a market in medium sized businesses that run Linux on the backend, but I would think most of those are using some other solution provided by one of the bigger ERP/CRM/Accounting/All-in-one software houses.
There is a reason why I switched to Mac five years ago. One of them being the total lack of commerical software support for small businesses.
Oh and what about the 85% of gun crime in Australia is comitted with firearms obtained illegally. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Aust ralia)
When people want to get firearms, they will find a way no matter what laws are in place.
Also, here in the United States we have this little thing called the 2nd Amendment, which as far as many Americans are concerned, might as well have been an edict from God.
Blender's game engine has been on the way out since it hit Opensource land. If you recall, the first few released after being released Open source excluded the game engine. Blender is now dominated by those of us who use it for CGI/animation and modelling work for videos and fun. Making Blender easy to use with Crystal Space (called crystal blend iirc) has been the project to watch. The idea is to make it simple to create 3D worlds in Blender and then export to Crystal Space as the game engine.
Back around 1999 - 2001 I ran a server with the opensource Promisance browser based MMOG. I rememer as part of my policy I had the "could terminate account for any reason" clause so I could deal with any problem players as judge jury and IP (as in TCP/IP tables not intellectual property) executioner.
Granted, my game was free and as such, I wonder if would have been subject to the same rules.
Was basing in a country with rather liberal copyright policies. I said back in the days of Napster that was their major flaw. Had they been based in a country with little or no regaurd for IP rights, what could have been done about it? That is the paradox of an open internet that governments have been trying to solve.
It was only a matter of time before governments began trying to figure out a way to regulate the Internet. All governments like control and the internet is by its very nature hard to control, and designed to be a nigh bit diffcult because of redundancy, etc. Sure China and Saudi Arabia and other countries try by limiting the number of ISPs and including filters, but people still find a way.
If you want to do something illegal on the net and can find a way to make money at it (the real tragic flaw of Napster), then there are a host of countries that would be happy to host for a percentage. And I'm not sure if anything can really be done to stop that. Trying to stop drugs hasn't worked.
I remember studying the airlines in detail during business school as a "how not to run an industry." Basically the major airlines started to try and slit each other throats with price wars and frequant flyer programs, etc.. And the major players pretty much did. Other carriers, like southwest, didn't play that ballgame manage to make a profit. Hell, for years there was a congressional bill that prevented Southwest from flying in and out of Love field in Dallas without making a stop in within so many miles of Dallas. Now that's repealed, it's cheaper and easier for us to fly to visit family.
Kind of like the Automotive industry has in the past few years when they started offering those 0% deals. GM figured their financing cost of capital was low enough that, yeah, sure, they'd bleed, but it would be stabbing the heart of Chrysler and the slitting the jugglar at Ford when those companies matched the offer. Why? Proably because some idiot was worried about next quarter's marketshare numbers instead of making a profit.
Well it worked, but the japs didn't take the bait and now what's happening? And the auto industry ain't regulated. There are some businesses that make really stupid decisions. No amount of regulation is going to stop people from being stupid.
Where I am now, I can have my phone service with one company and DSL through another. My Dad lives in a state where it's a regulated local monopoly and his phone company as screwed the customers for years in DSL rates and the cable company isn't much better since they know the customers really don't have any other choices. If he lived 2 miles north of where he does, he could get DSL for $30 a month where he's paying about $45 now for the same speed. The state I'm living in now "deregulated" by saying that local phone companies had to open their lines to any provider that I choose.
Why we stayed clear of the GPL
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Frankly I have to be honest, I am no longer directly in the programming field, but about seven years ago I worked developing web-based applications. I was a big fan of open source at the time, as there were some solutions out there in FOSS land that would do what we needed with some tweaking. In my opinion, it would have sped up development time by at least a couple months. Which at that time, faster to market was always better.
We discussed it and the company president was worried something like the GPL 3 could be a problem in the future. There were serious questions on whether or not we could us our modified code without releasing it. It was going to be used only on our company website and not released for sale to others, yet it would have been there for the public to use for a subscription. So the answer was use only code if it was available under the BSD-style license.
Since that day, I've been a fan of the GPL for personal/hobby projects, but have stayed clear of most opensource software in the business world other than popular CMS systems like Xoops and Joomla.
Mod me down if you'd like, but I've been of the opinion that if you truely believe in open and free software, BSD-style is the way to go. GPL maybe open, but it has strings attached and often is only free as in beer.
IANAL...yet, still got another year....
Depends on the application, but one thing you can do is refuse to give your social socurity number until you fill out the government tax forms. In fact you are not required by law to give that information out to anyone other than the government.
That being said, a lot of employement applications have funny wording that says "By signing here you allow Company XYZ to do ABC and that what you've said is trueful, blah, blah, blah." That part, especially if you apply online and don't read the terms and conditions box, you have to watch out for. Contracts can be written to say anything.
Now on to more complicated stuff...in order to pull your credit score you have to be in an industry where it may be relavant. Like if you were applying to work for a bank or as a finacial planner, etc.. In those areas it may show some kind of impact. But if you are applying for a job in IT or marketing, it shouldn't even be considered. I know of a dentist once that pulled my credit score even though I was a new patient with insurance and was paying cash for my cleaning and a couple fillings. Since I wasn't applying for credit, he's not supposed to do that. I mentioned it the next cleaning. If I saw it again, I'd have one of the lawyers where I'm working this summer send him a note on a legal letterhead saying shame on you. That get's peoples attention.
I probably didn't get an interview or two when I was looking for work after undergrad because I refused to give out my social security number, especially to anything I applied on-line too. I even remember one or two places where they had that as a required field on their online field. And I've told them, if I'm hired, you get it when I'm hired and fill out the W-4 or whichever form it is for the government to take 20% of my check. And by law, I am in my rights to do so and technically if you could prove they ignored you because you did not give out that information...then you'd have a case. Now proving it is the hard part.
A lot of colleges/universities also file defensive patents. The reason you file these kind of patents is incase of a situation like with the telephone. Someone else has the same/similar idea and beats you to the patent office...suddenly your on the other end of a cease and desist or worse. By not filing for patents you are risking lots of problems down the road. I understand this.
The flip side though is once someone realizes that, "HEY XYZ is using my patent! I could make money from licensing!" those patents often becoming offensive. Most often, especially in a case of small guy owning the patent, the infrining group will settle for some amount of money, out of court, and everyone walks away happy. When the big guys have them and the small guy does something wrong, then your screwed. It's the ole, "We have more money for lawyers than you do, so go out of business."
Two months ago I was working as a consultant with a Durable Medical Equipement company. It's a small business, 7 employees and about a 800k in sales a year. Their computer system and software was still running on DOS. (at least server end) and as they were going for new accredidation they realized the old software just wasn't going to make the requirements.
The software company was still in business and we chatted with their support team a couple times and they expressly told us "THIS SOFTWARE WILL NOT WORK WITH VISTA". This was back in January. They liked dealing with Dell. I'm a Mac guy myself, but in these kind of situations, one is stuck with the option of windows...or windows.
They were a small business and about half their sales is through public aid. Anyone dealing with the government knows that you'll get your money....eventually. They were waiting for a payment to come in before they had the extra cash to purchase the server, two new workstations, and software. In total it was about $15,000. ($10,000 of that being the software).
They didn't get their check until March. By then Dell wasn't selling anything but Vista on their machines and the software vendor hated dealing with HP (so much so that they simply don't.) I don't do service contracts. I simply provide advice acting more like a CTO to small businesses helping them sort through the FUD and answer any questions...and tell them when the sales people are full of *#$&#. Personally I told them to go with DELL because they were the only ones I knew would still be around in five years to offer support. But what was the install options on the new workstations? Well Vista and um....vista.
So we ended up buying the entire system through Gateway. Not my first choice for several reasons, but they still offered PC's with XP pre-installed. Install went without a hitch and we sent the old box out to the company's lab to recover all 20 years worth of records and it was the first time I have ever done a major system port without loosing a single record. Frankly that was one of the smoothest transitions on that end.
But still Dell was doing their same old game of "Only the latest Operating system from MS." and that cost them a sale. I got a lot of calls from businesses asking, "Do I need Vista?" With the chances that some of their software won't run, my answer was (and still is) no. Stick with XP at least for another year. You don't buy an MS OS until Service Pack 1 is released.
It's just like my true mac head friends that want to preorder the iPhone today or purchased an AppleTV. There is no way in hell I'm buying the first generation of anything Apple. (That being said, I've been using a Mac Mini with LCD TV since it has a DVI plug in for almost a year now).
I've been cut enough times, that I stay behind the bleeding edge these days.
I started out with Linux, then moved to FreeBSD and ended up on Mac 5 years ago. Why? Unix core, most OSS apps were easy enough to recomplie into MacOSX, I could purchase commerical applications like Adobe, MS Office, Macromedia(now adobe) and could use the nice Apple Applications Final Cut Studio.
I got tired of drivers for XYZ device either not working in Linux or sorta working and when I graduated from college I found that my time was worth something: not playing with computers. I needed them to work for work. (Which is video editing mainly). Furthermore I wanted something that was mobile and Apple makes the best laptops hands down. Linux on laptops still tends to have issues even today.
And I wasn't the only one. I know a lot of web development people that stopped using Linux for LAMPS development and switched to MacOSX and never looked back. Why fight things when you can have your cake and eat it too?
I first used Linux almost 15 years ago and I've been hearing "Just wait, linux will dominate the desktop market someday". Well, Apple beat the to it with a user friendly GUI interface built on *iux. Linux just replaced the other 50 versions of Unix in the server room. Not a popular thing to say around here, but Linux has had a good decade to mature. It's come a long way, but still really hasn't made it out of the hobbiest/enthusist community as far as deloyment on the desktop side of things.
I like copyright and frankly I'm getting to the point where I'm agreeing with the DMCA more and more.
I'm a small fry video producer that relies on copyright to protect the works I sell. I have had others try and pirate and use some of my works, particularly digital art preproduced on T-shirts, etc.. That is annoying because this guy made a few hundred dollars off my works and I got $0.
I am in the business of creating original copyrighted materials that I use to earn a living. Whether it is from writing articles, some of which I get paid for, or selling videos I create, that is how I make my living.
Six years ago I was screaming against the DMCA, also was in college at the time, but now on the other side of the tracks....
This is the age old debate that killed the Apollo program in the 1970's. People asked the same basic question, "Why spend all this money to go to the moon. We've been there done that. We have starving people still on earth and wars and other bad things we could solve." There is also a voice withing the scientific community, most notably comming from Carl Sagan, that robots can do it faster, cheaper, and arguably better.
If NASA went totally robotic, yes they may learn things, but public interest and their budget to do such missions would shrink as a few nerdy folks in the bowls of mission control would actually care.
Case in point: the current mars rovers that are STILL going around Mars. Spirit and Oppertunity have been wildly sucessful way beyond their initial expectation, yet when was the last time you heard a news report about how well the mission as gone? The arguement goes, the less the public sees pretty pictures (like from hubble) or having people fly the missions, the less the public cares. The less the public cares, the more funds go else where to other things and missions continue to scale back.
Frankly, NASA's $15B budget is meager considering they are one of the few outfits that spends money on Basic Research. Basic research is what yields new technologys that help keep the economy going and improves daily life. It's thinks like that that yielded us many of the devices we use every day. I'm not going to go into them all, but you can read other posts about it.
Here is my arguement.
Fact: If humanity is going to survive, we have to get off this rock.
Also, given the times, sending people to the moon and mars is something that could be used to rally people together. Let's face it, there is a lot of bad things on the horizon. Militant Islam is going to be a problem until enough brave men stand up instead of doing nothing. (I'm sorry, but there are some things going on now that rhymes, as Mark Twain would say, with what happened in the 1930's.) Also you have new global economic battlelines being drawn between the US, EU, and China. With all that going on, reaching for the stars is something, if sold to the people, could turn things around.
Then there is this: if not us, who? The Chinese? Frankly the Chinese would be the type to land on the moon and start mining for resources and say: "Screw the moon treaty, what are you going to do about it?" The Europeans? So far they've had no interest in doing so... If the US gets back to the moon and keeps the mentality of using it for exploration and scientific purpose, it continues a presenant that is hard to break politically.
Anyone that has followed Apple products over the years knows not to purchase the first generation of any Apple redesign. I did buy the 1st generation snow white iBook (the ones with all the Logic Board problems) and I had reservations from the git go, but timing was the big issue. (I was leaving the country for a year and needed a new laptop, fortunatly I was back home before the problems began)
I had a friend that is an Apple Early adopter. He had about a 1-yr old PowerBook (1.25Ghz, 2GB RAM, all the other fixings) the he sold to me for a going rate below Ebay so he could get one of the brand new MacBookPro's. So far he's happy, although the week after he bought it he realized there wasn't any software available and he had to run everything through rosetta.
This PowerBook should last me a couple years at least into Law School at which point all the major software applications (office, PS, Pro Tools, etc.) will be converted and any design flaws caught and fixed (hopefully).
The lesson here is: (and goes for any technology really) Early Adpotors beware!
I'm going to Law School this fall and will be looking to replace my G3 iBook. Dual core anything will be a little overkill, but I do a bit of hobby work in Blender 3D (www.blender.org) so that should help.
You you imagine an Xgrid of these things?
(no apologies to the Beowolf crowd)
I am considering dropping daily delivery and just getting the sunday editions for coupons of the local St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I can read the articles online that I want, but over all there isn't a lot of news. The main section I read is the business and sports during the baseball season.
THey have been cutting the number of stock listings and most of their news they get from other sources. Plus we get the Wall Street Journal at work so I am less tempted to even order that publiction.
Law enforcement have been wiretapping telephone and telegraph lines. They did so with the consent of the teleco companies and most people didn't even know the police did this. It wasn't until the 1930's that the The Federal Communications Act prohibitied wire-tapping, even for the government.
Even though the information could not be used in court, the FBI and other police agencies continued to wire tap suspects. Again, they couldn't use the evidence in court, but if the police just happen to know where the mob was going to preform a hit or bank robbery and the police just happened to be ready to catch them in the act....
FDR was the one that allowed the FBI & the Police to go before a judge get a warrent to tap a phone. Why? To stop Nazi Spies in WWII. How many Nazi spies and sabatures did the FBI actually nab during WWII? Actually I don't know the answer to that one.
There is an old book called Ease Droppers that gives some interesting insights into the early world wiretapping. Governments have been using ease dropping technology starting with the Romans. They will continue to demand and use it in to the future.
I work in a professional video production shop. We're a small outfit of about 20 employees, but we do use 3D software for a varity of animation tasks, but mostly for animated logos and 3D titles.
We use Lightwave 3D as our primary tool and until a month ago we were starting to use Blender more in house for animatics and quick jobs. Once Blender introduced an internal Ray Tracing engine and Yafray export options, the quality greatly increased.
What happened was we were attempting to do a simple animatic. We had been using Blender 2.32 and we had recently downloaded 2.37a. Everything with keyframing animation changed from the old default settings. After nearly a day wasted trying to make it work in the new version the we said screw it, exported the models to.LWO format, opened up Lightwave and had the thing done and rendered inside of 2 hours.
After that it was decided to delete Blender from the computers and go 100% to Lightwave for all our animation needs. Here is why:
Blender has been changing rapidly, too rapidly. One of our animation pros commented: "Its like having to learn a new application every 3 months they make so many changes". Anytime you make that many changes it takes time to relearn and that time takes money. Case in point, our project that should have been set up and ready to go in about an hour or two and rendered with the output ready after lunch took wasted nearly 6 hours. That 6 hours we spent (3 of us employees) trying to do a simple task easily cost us $600 an hour in lost time if you add in our salaries plus lost time we could have spend working on other projects we had at the time. That's $3,600 we wasted on a Free program.
Lightwave now costs about $800 a seat. Most of our seats were around $1500 each and we have 10 seats. However, people we hire typically right out of college have had at least a basic Lightwave 101 course with their video production classes.
That being said, Blender 3D can do some impressive work, especially someone that knows what they are doing. I've used Blender since version 1.8 and 5+ years later I'm still not great at 3D work with Blender. I've used Lightwave for about 3 years and can do a more professional looking stuff quicker, mainly because I can download and purchase a lot more models for Lightwave than I can find for Blender.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. All it seems people use them for is just talking crap about each other. I maybe only get to play a couple hours a month anymore and really only want to play co-op missions for fun. It's entertainment. I always run into a few folks there for the same reason, but even more kids that are frankly punks out to diss everyone else and prove to the universe how cool they are.
That and clans. Everyone seems to be talking about this clan or that clan or do you want to join a clan...crap, I want to charge up the hill with people that know a thing or two about fire/movement tactics, and have some fun! I don't care about the inner politics of the gaming community.
Don't they already do this, it's called KHTML.
With the options of Opera, FF, Safari all out there on various platforms, that's a good thing. There for a while it was shaping up to be a one horse race. So my response is suck it up and produce the better browser that people will want to use.
So we ported one of our applications to see what the viability would be and offered a free version and a pro version for a fee. I think we maybe sold around a 100 pro copies for Linux out of 6200 downloads, but we ran into a lot of problems. Tech support was a bitch. Now things have improved, but at the time we developed for RH and SuSE, but we got emails with: "This won't work on Slackware, or Debian, or pick your version here." Trying to explain we only supported RH and SuSE only tended to make people mad. That's not to mention the amount of email we got lecturing us why everything should be "free". Now, sure we had clients that paid
The windows version had 11,000 versions and about 3500 users that upgraded to the full version. To put it mildly, the Linux market was too small to make it viable because it consumed at least as much time to answer tech support questions as it did for Windows and the user base was 35x's larger. Eventually someone did develop a small application that did about the same thing as ours for free/oss and we ceased development on linux before the company was bought out and disbanded. We had a better product, but what we found when reading what customers told us (when they did) was they'd take second rate free for Linux over paying for something of quality.
Sorry, that was just the first hand experience I had. Personally I got tired of it and bought a Mac in 2002 and have been on OSX ever sense at home and work. One of my reasonings was, "Hell I can run GIMP and my fav. *iux apss and get Microsoft Office and other commerical software." Now there are folks like you, and me (I'll spend the money if it's worth it), but those numbers in the Linux desktop market are very few and unless it's something special, aren't enough to make it a viable market for many appliactions. Again it's chicken and the egg. More people won't develop Linux until there are more desktop users. And people won't use Linux until theirs more applications for it. That was how it was 5 years ago and it's still that way.
given an annual budget of 15Billion a year, they still have another 20 years or so to reach a trillion.
The program works on Mac and is easy to use for me. Now I had accounting with my business degree, which helps, but it's extremely easy to use and my CPA gives me a discount for using it. In fact, I just spent the past two hours catching up on this weeks invoices and payments a project renders.
Quickbooks is great for not so savvy users and those of us who need to spend our time earning money, not spending hours with a ledger. And the discount I get from my CPA for keeping up with Quickbooks more than pays for the software. Also, my business checking and savings accounts work with Quickbooks making it easy for me to spend less time on the books and more time doing work and getting paid.
And if you are an accountant, then you know one of the reasons why it has to update so much is all the damned changes to tax codes, etc. every time you turn around. The number of hours my CPA spends going to IRS classes and reading stacks of changes to tax code and how things can be classified, etc. is insane.
That's not to say that it doesn't have it's drawbacks. If I had employs and had to pay an extra $300 a year to use their payroll services, I might be a little more annoyed. Again, I use it because for me it's the best option. If someone develops a better mousetrap, I'll use it. Until then I'm sticking with what works.
Quickbook's market are small businesses, people like me. And they either run Windows (mostly), or Mac(in my case). There might be a market in medium sized businesses that run Linux on the backend, but I would think most of those are using some other solution provided by one of the bigger ERP/CRM/Accounting/All-in-one software houses.
There is a reason why I switched to Mac five years ago. One of them being the total lack of commerical software support for small businesses.
And what occurs more often? Armed robberies or mass shooting?
And with all those laws keeping everyone safe, how did this happen?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monash_University_sho oting
Oh and what about the 85% of gun crime in Australia is comitted with firearms obtained illegally. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Aust ralia)
When people want to get firearms, they will find a way no matter what laws are in place.
Also, here in the United States we have this little thing called the 2nd Amendment, which as far as many Americans are concerned, might as well have been an edict from God.
Blender's game engine has been on the way out since it hit Opensource land. If you recall, the first few released after being released Open source excluded the game engine. Blender is now dominated by those of us who use it for CGI/animation and modelling work for videos and fun. Making Blender easy to use with Crystal Space (called crystal blend iirc) has been the project to watch. The idea is to make it simple to create 3D worlds in Blender and then export to Crystal Space as the game engine.
Granted, my game was free and as such, I wonder if would have been subject to the same rules.
It was only a matter of time before governments began trying to figure out a way to regulate the Internet. All governments like control and the internet is by its very nature hard to control, and designed to be a nigh bit diffcult because of redundancy, etc. Sure China and Saudi Arabia and other countries try by limiting the number of ISPs and including filters, but people still find a way.
If you want to do something illegal on the net and can find a way to make money at it (the real tragic flaw of Napster), then there are a host of countries that would be happy to host for a percentage. And I'm not sure if anything can really be done to stop that. Trying to stop drugs hasn't worked.
Kind of like the Automotive industry has in the past few years when they started offering those 0% deals. GM figured their financing cost of capital was low enough that, yeah, sure, they'd bleed, but it would be stabbing the heart of Chrysler and the slitting the jugglar at Ford when those companies matched the offer. Why? Proably because some idiot was worried about next quarter's marketshare numbers instead of making a profit.
Well it worked, but the japs didn't take the bait and now what's happening? And the auto industry ain't regulated. There are some businesses that make really stupid decisions. No amount of regulation is going to stop people from being stupid.
Where I am now, I can have my phone service with one company and DSL through another. My Dad lives in a state where it's a regulated local monopoly and his phone company as screwed the customers for years in DSL rates and the cable company isn't much better since they know the customers really don't have any other choices. If he lived 2 miles north of where he does, he could get DSL for $30 a month where he's paying about $45 now for the same speed. The state I'm living in now "deregulated" by saying that local phone companies had to open their lines to any provider that I choose.
We discussed it and the company president was worried something like the GPL 3 could be a problem in the future. There were serious questions on whether or not we could us our modified code without releasing it. It was going to be used only on our company website and not released for sale to others, yet it would have been there for the public to use for a subscription. So the answer was use only code if it was available under the BSD-style license.
Since that day, I've been a fan of the GPL for personal/hobby projects, but have stayed clear of most opensource software in the business world other than popular CMS systems like Xoops and Joomla.
Mod me down if you'd like, but I've been of the opinion that if you truely believe in open and free software, BSD-style is the way to go. GPL maybe open, but it has strings attached and often is only free as in beer.
IANAL...yet, still got another year.... Depends on the application, but one thing you can do is refuse to give your social socurity number until you fill out the government tax forms. In fact you are not required by law to give that information out to anyone other than the government. That being said, a lot of employement applications have funny wording that says "By signing here you allow Company XYZ to do ABC and that what you've said is trueful, blah, blah, blah." That part, especially if you apply online and don't read the terms and conditions box, you have to watch out for. Contracts can be written to say anything. Now on to more complicated stuff...in order to pull your credit score you have to be in an industry where it may be relavant. Like if you were applying to work for a bank or as a finacial planner, etc.. In those areas it may show some kind of impact. But if you are applying for a job in IT or marketing, it shouldn't even be considered. I know of a dentist once that pulled my credit score even though I was a new patient with insurance and was paying cash for my cleaning and a couple fillings. Since I wasn't applying for credit, he's not supposed to do that. I mentioned it the next cleaning. If I saw it again, I'd have one of the lawyers where I'm working this summer send him a note on a legal letterhead saying shame on you. That get's peoples attention. I probably didn't get an interview or two when I was looking for work after undergrad because I refused to give out my social security number, especially to anything I applied on-line too. I even remember one or two places where they had that as a required field on their online field. And I've told them, if I'm hired, you get it when I'm hired and fill out the W-4 or whichever form it is for the government to take 20% of my check. And by law, I am in my rights to do so and technically if you could prove they ignored you because you did not give out that information...then you'd have a case. Now proving it is the hard part.
A lot of colleges/universities also file defensive patents. The reason you file these kind of patents is incase of a situation like with the telephone. Someone else has the same/similar idea and beats you to the patent office...suddenly your on the other end of a cease and desist or worse. By not filing for patents you are risking lots of problems down the road. I understand this.
The flip side though is once someone realizes that, "HEY XYZ is using my patent! I could make money from licensing!" those patents often becoming offensive. Most often, especially in a case of small guy owning the patent, the infrining group will settle for some amount of money, out of court, and everyone walks away happy. When the big guys have them and the small guy does something wrong, then your screwed. It's the ole, "We have more money for lawyers than you do, so go out of business."
Two months ago I was working as a consultant with a Durable Medical Equipement company. It's a small business, 7 employees and about a 800k in sales a year. Their computer system and software was still running on DOS. (at least server end) and as they were going for new accredidation they realized the old software just wasn't going to make the requirements. The software company was still in business and we chatted with their support team a couple times and they expressly told us "THIS SOFTWARE WILL NOT WORK WITH VISTA". This was back in January. They liked dealing with Dell. I'm a Mac guy myself, but in these kind of situations, one is stuck with the option of windows...or windows. They were a small business and about half their sales is through public aid. Anyone dealing with the government knows that you'll get your money....eventually. They were waiting for a payment to come in before they had the extra cash to purchase the server, two new workstations, and software. In total it was about $15,000. ($10,000 of that being the software). They didn't get their check until March. By then Dell wasn't selling anything but Vista on their machines and the software vendor hated dealing with HP (so much so that they simply don't.) I don't do service contracts. I simply provide advice acting more like a CTO to small businesses helping them sort through the FUD and answer any questions...and tell them when the sales people are full of *#$&#. Personally I told them to go with DELL because they were the only ones I knew would still be around in five years to offer support. But what was the install options on the new workstations? Well Vista and um....vista. So we ended up buying the entire system through Gateway. Not my first choice for several reasons, but they still offered PC's with XP pre-installed. Install went without a hitch and we sent the old box out to the company's lab to recover all 20 years worth of records and it was the first time I have ever done a major system port without loosing a single record. Frankly that was one of the smoothest transitions on that end. But still Dell was doing their same old game of "Only the latest Operating system from MS." and that cost them a sale. I got a lot of calls from businesses asking, "Do I need Vista?" With the chances that some of their software won't run, my answer was (and still is) no. Stick with XP at least for another year. You don't buy an MS OS until Service Pack 1 is released. It's just like my true mac head friends that want to preorder the iPhone today or purchased an AppleTV. There is no way in hell I'm buying the first generation of anything Apple. (That being said, I've been using a Mac Mini with LCD TV since it has a DVI plug in for almost a year now). I've been cut enough times, that I stay behind the bleeding edge these days.
I started out with Linux, then moved to FreeBSD and ended up on Mac 5 years ago. Why? Unix core, most OSS apps were easy enough to recomplie into MacOSX, I could purchase commerical applications like Adobe, MS Office, Macromedia(now adobe) and could use the nice Apple Applications Final Cut Studio.
I got tired of drivers for XYZ device either not working in Linux or sorta working and when I graduated from college I found that my time was worth something: not playing with computers. I needed them to work for work. (Which is video editing mainly). Furthermore I wanted something that was mobile and Apple makes the best laptops hands down. Linux on laptops still tends to have issues even today.
And I wasn't the only one. I know a lot of web development people that stopped using Linux for LAMPS development and switched to MacOSX and never looked back. Why fight things when you can have your cake and eat it too?
I first used Linux almost 15 years ago and I've been hearing "Just wait, linux will dominate the desktop market someday". Well, Apple beat the to it with a user friendly GUI interface built on *iux. Linux just replaced the other 50 versions of Unix in the server room. Not a popular thing to say around here, but Linux has had a good decade to mature. It's come a long way, but still really hasn't made it out of the hobbiest/enthusist community as far as deloyment on the desktop side of things.
I like copyright and frankly I'm getting to the point where I'm agreeing with the DMCA more and more. I'm a small fry video producer that relies on copyright to protect the works I sell. I have had others try and pirate and use some of my works, particularly digital art preproduced on T-shirts, etc.. That is annoying because this guy made a few hundred dollars off my works and I got $0. I am in the business of creating original copyrighted materials that I use to earn a living. Whether it is from writing articles, some of which I get paid for, or selling videos I create, that is how I make my living. Six years ago I was screaming against the DMCA, also was in college at the time, but now on the other side of the tracks....
Which is a perfect example of why socialism is evil. Sincerely, Your Big Friendly Media Giant
This is the age old debate that killed the Apollo program in the 1970's. People asked the same basic question, "Why spend all this money to go to the moon. We've been there done that. We have starving people still on earth and wars and other bad things we could solve." There is also a voice withing the scientific community, most notably comming from Carl Sagan, that robots can do it faster, cheaper, and arguably better.
If NASA went totally robotic, yes they may learn things, but public interest and their budget to do such missions would shrink as a few nerdy folks in the bowls of mission control would actually care.
Case in point: the current mars rovers that are STILL going around Mars. Spirit and Oppertunity have been wildly sucessful way beyond their initial expectation, yet when was the last time you heard a news report about how well the mission as gone? The arguement goes, the less the public sees pretty pictures (like from hubble) or having people fly the missions, the less the public cares. The less the public cares, the more funds go else where to other things and missions continue to scale back.
Frankly, NASA's $15B budget is meager considering they are one of the few outfits that spends money on Basic Research. Basic research is what yields new technologys that help keep the economy going and improves daily life. It's thinks like that that yielded us many of the devices we use every day. I'm not going to go into them all, but you can read other posts about it.
Here is my arguement.
Fact: If humanity is going to survive, we have to get off this rock.
Also, given the times, sending people to the moon and mars is something that could be used to rally people together. Let's face it, there is a lot of bad things on the horizon. Militant Islam is going to be a problem until enough brave men stand up instead of doing nothing. (I'm sorry, but there are some things going on now that rhymes, as Mark Twain would say, with what happened in the 1930's.) Also you have new global economic battlelines being drawn between the US, EU, and China. With all that going on, reaching for the stars is something, if sold to the people, could turn things around.
Then there is this: if not us, who? The Chinese? Frankly the Chinese would be the type to land on the moon and start mining for resources and say: "Screw the moon treaty, what are you going to do about it?" The Europeans? So far they've had no interest in doing so... If the US gets back to the moon and keeps the mentality of using it for exploration and scientific purpose, it continues a presenant that is hard to break politically.
Anyone that has followed Apple products over the years knows not to purchase the first generation of any Apple redesign. I did buy the 1st generation snow white iBook (the ones with all the Logic Board problems) and I had reservations from the git go, but timing was the big issue. (I was leaving the country for a year and needed a new laptop, fortunatly I was back home before the problems began) I had a friend that is an Apple Early adopter. He had about a 1-yr old PowerBook (1.25Ghz, 2GB RAM, all the other fixings) the he sold to me for a going rate below Ebay so he could get one of the brand new MacBookPro's. So far he's happy, although the week after he bought it he realized there wasn't any software available and he had to run everything through rosetta. This PowerBook should last me a couple years at least into Law School at which point all the major software applications (office, PS, Pro Tools, etc.) will be converted and any design flaws caught and fixed (hopefully). The lesson here is: (and goes for any technology really) Early Adpotors beware!
I'm going to Law School this fall and will be looking to replace my G3 iBook. Dual core anything will be a little overkill, but I do a bit of hobby work in Blender 3D (www.blender.org) so that should help. You you imagine an Xgrid of these things? (no apologies to the Beowolf crowd)
THey have been cutting the number of stock listings and most of their news they get from other sources. Plus we get the Wall Street Journal at work so I am less tempted to even order that publiction.
Even though the information could not be used in court, the FBI and other police agencies continued to wire tap suspects. Again, they couldn't use the evidence in court, but if the police just happen to know where the mob was going to preform a hit or bank robbery and the police just happened to be ready to catch them in the act....
FDR was the one that allowed the FBI & the Police to go before a judge get a warrent to tap a phone. Why? To stop Nazi Spies in WWII. How many Nazi spies and sabatures did the FBI actually nab during WWII? Actually I don't know the answer to that one.
There is an old book called Ease Droppers that gives some interesting insights into the early world wiretapping. Governments have been using ease dropping technology starting with the Romans. They will continue to demand and use it in to the future.
We use Lightwave 3D as our primary tool and until a month ago we were starting to use Blender more in house for animatics and quick jobs. Once Blender introduced an internal Ray Tracing engine and Yafray export options, the quality greatly increased.
What happened was we were attempting to do a simple animatic. We had been using Blender 2.32 and we had recently downloaded 2.37a. Everything with keyframing animation changed from the old default settings. After nearly a day wasted trying to make it work in the new version the we said screw it, exported the models to .LWO format, opened up Lightwave and had the thing done and rendered inside of 2 hours.
After that it was decided to delete Blender from the computers and go 100% to Lightwave for all our animation needs. Here is why:
Blender has been changing rapidly, too rapidly. One of our animation pros commented: "Its like having to learn a new application every 3 months they make so many changes". Anytime you make that many changes it takes time to relearn and that time takes money. Case in point, our project that should have been set up and ready to go in about an hour or two and rendered with the output ready after lunch took wasted nearly 6 hours. That 6 hours we spent (3 of us employees) trying to do a simple task easily cost us $600 an hour in lost time if you add in our salaries plus lost time we could have spend working on other projects we had at the time. That's $3,600 we wasted on a Free program.
Lightwave now costs about $800 a seat. Most of our seats were around $1500 each and we have 10 seats. However, people we hire typically right out of college have had at least a basic Lightwave 101 course with their video production classes.
That being said, Blender 3D can do some impressive work, especially someone that knows what they are doing. I've used Blender since version 1.8 and 5+ years later I'm still not great at 3D work with Blender. I've used Lightwave for about 3 years and can do a more professional looking stuff quicker, mainly because I can download and purchase a lot more models for Lightwave than I can find for Blender.