The cake was presented during a Peering BoF at the NANOG meeting in Dearborn, MI this week, in reference to a joke on the NANOG mailing list that they had tried everything with Cogent short of baking them a cake.
The fork was started by contributors to Gaim. Many of them lost interest and time in maintaining the fork, which is why it was encouraged that the improvements get merged back into Gaim so that a larger pool of developers could work on them. That merge never happened and the code bitrotted because there was no agreement that it was what we wanted it to be.
The biggest problem had been deciding what software to use for the backend, and ultimately gstreamer with farsight has been chosen.
The version of Gaim-vv that existed was supporting Yahoo, whereas this time the student is implementing a documented voice and video protocol for XMPP and building the framework into Pidgin onto which other protocols' support may be applied.
Some protocols are still impossible because the codecs required don't exist, aren't stable or aren't in released versions of gstreamer or farsight. That said, from 4 years ago, many more of these things are much better supported on Linux than they used to be. There is apparently a summer of code project out there to create codecs for MSN's video chat requirements, so if that shows up on the scene, it certainly makes Pidgin's job easier.
There's also the issue of how this gstreamer and farsight work will port to Windows, and I don't think we're quite sure yet.
It's not that we don't think this is a good idea, it's just that we don't want it half-assed so we want people who actually care about using the feature to be the ones helping to design it.
This is common when you use the three-segment versioning method.
If you raise the first number, you are generally doing so to indicate your backwards compatibility is being broken and that you are changing or removing features in addition to adding new ones.
Changing the middle number means you're keeping compatibility with the previous version, but adding new major fuctionality.
Changing the last number means you're just adding patches that do not affect compatibility or features.
And you eventually have to stop supporting your old major version numbers, or you'll be forced to forever maintain multiple trees with substantially different codebases and no one will ever stop using them.
3) Burn down all competing datacentres in your city Most datacenter facilities are made of concrete, brick, and metal, which results in fairly low flammability. Interruption of power (if there are no generators) or network connectivity is likely to be more successful.:P
Don't use cPanel. While it automates a lot, it also makes lots of arbitrary modifications to the operating system rendering it annoying for use for anything else. Also, it and Plesk install lots and lots of extra things you will never use, wasting disk space and RAM without major tweaking and opening plenty of potential points of intrusion.
I work at a web hosting company and I find InterWorx to be the best at doing a little automation without making a mess of everything.
That said, if you know how to use Linux, don't use a control panel. You'll find it easier to manage things yourself. Short of the MTA, these things are really rather easy to configure.
Firefox 2 sends your URLs to Google if you turn on the feature. It's right there in the preferences, under security. It's even clearly marked to indicate that's what it does: "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery > Check by asking [Google] about each site I visit" So how is the new Firefox more evil?
I hadn't thought about Simsville until it was mentioned a few times here, but I think it's quite plausible. The limited information at the time told us that Simsville would be a SimCity-like game, which basically focused on the citizens of a smaller city, presumably more like a suburb. It was supposedly going to focus more on people than on city planning, so that while you were not micromanaging the days of individual people (as in The Sims), you were also not completely separated from their lives (as in SimCity).
I think some was rolled into SimCity 4, in the sense that it kept much closer track of what the populace was actually doing, so that the simulation was more accurate, but it did not expose the ability to interact with these Sims directly, which I believe Simsville would have done. If indeed that is what SimCity Societies aims to do, then it is basically a resurrection of that concept and I will be as excited about that prospect as I was when they first announced Simsville.
From what I was able to tell based on gameplay, I believe the game did keep track of each individual Sim within the game to a point. The Sim's job, life, etc were not strictly related to their living conditions, but for the purpose of traffic simulation, the game kept track of how many people lived in each building, where each of those people worked (specifically), and what route they took to get to work. Wealth/health/safety was determined on a per-building basis, not a per-sim basis, etc, and I think the game basically just kept track of extended information if you were actually tailing someone. I don't think the people on the sidewalk or the cars on the road really had any correlation to actual people, and would simply represent the state of the tile or a common route passing through the area. I gather this because they would frequently disappear and reappear at random after short trips from a meaningless point A to an equally meaningless point B.
This is mostly speculation, but it seems right based on how I observed the game.
The problem is that names do matter. If you call a game "The Game" and then call your sequel, "The Game II," some people are going to buy "The Game II" simply because they were fans of "The Game," which is now fondly called TG1 for short. If "The Game" was a Greek Mythology Based FPS and "The Game II" is a Monopoly knock-off, that is going to bother some people. (I know, I'm stretching a bit.):)
It's not so much a problem that this game is called SimCity, but rather that this game is not going to be a sequel in the strictest sense to SimCity 4, and thus the name appears to be somewhat of a misnomer or marketing ploy to get people to buy something that isn't what they want or expected. Obviously anyone really paying attention should be able to tell the difference, and I am not really that upset about the use of the name SimCity, since they seem to be planning not to number it and directly imply a sequential continuation of a series, but rather a concept with a shift ("societies"). I am upset because I wanted a new SimCity game in the sense of what SimCity is now, and that seems to be something that will not happen for now. My worry is that it will never happen again. This does not please me, and I hope you can see why.
Even so, I am not going to write off SimCity Societies. I am angry at it for not being what I wanted, but I am open to the idea that it will still be something that I want. Time will tell.
To my knowledge Will hasn't had a hand in SimCity or The Sims in a while. He's been puttering away in a separate studio for a least a few years on Spore, and possibly some other projects. I haven't exchanged emails with him in many years, but last I was able to get a gauge on things, he was progressing toward less involvement in current games (and their sequels) and more involvement in new ideas. Since then I know that he's moved to that separate studio. EA is controlling The Sims, because it's the most popular franchise, ever. By my guess, EA doesn't want to worry about SimCity because it is a fringe market (though one that is ultimately responsible for The Sims being possible in the first place). I think they prefer (or at least see some value in) keeping the product/franchise alive, but they don't care about it enough anymore to put their own people on the job. As I see it, this pretty much signals the end of days for any even minutely coherent entity named Maxis. The Sims is no longer (but even by initially release was only barely) Maxis, SimCity is no longer Maxis. Maybe Spore is still Maxis, but it if doesn't do well enough, I think that's it for Maxis.:(
That all said, I am glad EA is letting Will Wright exercise his creativity to come up with genuinely new things with his own team, separately from EA's dominant and slave-driving hand, and I'm reasonably sure he had little to no input into this decision, nor any recent decisions regarding The Sims.
Re:Already using it, much better than gaim.
on
Pidgin 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
A lot of people haven't realized that Pidgin's versioning scheme is actually based upon the API (programming interface). If it breaks binary/API compatibility with a previous release, the major version number has to be incremented. This is what happened when the project went 1.0.0 (it was decided that a new versioning scheme was needed.) There was confusion at that time as well, thinking "Gaim is finally considered stable." It's all about whether you can (theoretically) just plop in a new version of the library and have it still be able to run with plugins/UIs.
There were specific goals for this API/ABI breakage cycle, besides the AOL settlement, which included a vast rewrite of the status (away message, etc) system and its UI, and the completion of the core and UI split, which could not have been easily done without a major version bump. Of course, the API was completely broken by the rename of the internal functions to purple/pidgin/finch. The next major version bump may be relatively (less than 2 years) soon, depending upon how quickly the developers get together the API changing projects they're planning.
Voice support, however, could realistically be in 2.1.0 or 2.2.0 if it doesn't break API and merely adds new functions. I am certainly not promising that, so DON'T MISQUOTE ME.:P
Of course, the secret list was started on SourceForge because it was needed prior to securing a new server. To try to match your analogy, the elevator was set up such that it didn't stop on any unsecured floors. Generally speaking, if you've got the elevator configured to stop only on certain floors, you don't expect the doors to randomly open elsewhere. It was SourceForge's screwup. They did apologize and they helped fix this issue, but the leak was enough to start the rumor mill, and we were just lucky the settlement was finishing up right then, allowing the announcement to be made before things got completely out of hand.
Part of this apparently is due to legal problems with Gaim which no doubt discouraged the developers. Part of it is Google hiring the lead developer to jump ship and focus primarily on Google Talk.
Sean Egan did not jump ship. He is still in charge of the project and has been managing the whole legal process (and everything related to it) since AOL started going after him.
Stop making excuses, get someone working on VV, even if they don't enjoy it, and get it to work!
This is a damned foolish thing to say, showing complete lack of understanding of open source. It is now YOUR job to implement VV. You may not like it, but I've made up my mind and you seem like the perfect candidate. Get it working, or you'll have to answer to Gaim's vast userbase! Where should I hae users send their complaints?
People working on Gaim do so in their free time for no profit. Why would any one of us want to spend our time doing something we don't like? The mindset that open source software developers should do whatever people demand them to makes no sense. As volunteers, they should have every right to put their free time into the aspects of the software they are interested in and enjoy working on.
If videoconferencing support for Linux is poor, it's because Linux users that want it don't have the means or motivation to implement it. This is not to say that their only choice is to learn to program. They can certainly sponsor a bounty or contribute in other ways, but to demand that volunteers do what you tell them to is a great way to lose volunteers (or to get them to start resenting users of their software).
In open source, contributors get to make the rules. That's just the way it is. If you want products which cater to the features requested by users instead of contributors, consider non-free solutions and be willing to pay for them.
Gaim is very much in favor of doing this implementation correctly, but also, and more importantly, most of the people developing for Gaim don't care about VV support. Keep in mind how open source works. If you want to help VV support along, talk to the developers, find out what kind of plans are already in place, and then write up some patches... or you can certainly fork Gaim, implement VV as crappily as you like, and release it yourself. The friendly approach is preferred and indeed welcome. If someone were contributing acceptable VV support, it would be in Gaim already.
As for the promise of VV in 2.0.0, I don't recall it ever being promised, but even if it was, plans change. The gaim-vv fork which was to be merged into Gaim was deemed unusable due to major changes to the design plan for VV support. It was decided many months ago that VV support would not be in 2.0.0, and would most likely be held over until 3.0.0.
Keep in mind here that versioning in Gaim is API based, so if VV were implemented 4 months after Gaim 2.0.0 came out and didn't break 2.x API compatibility, 2.2 could have VV at that time, or 3.0.0 could be released at that time breaking that compatibility.
I think it's inaccurate to say it remains to be seen if IE7 will change this. Microsoft has released beta 2 to the public and from my limited testing there have already been significant improvements in the renderer. I was pleased to find that my standards-compliant sites without IE hacks already work nearly flawlessly in IE7.
The thing about Google is they make no attempt to hide the fact they are collecting a tremendous amount of data about people and people let them. If you don't want your information stored by Google, you don't opt into any of Google's services. There is nothing compelling you to use a Gmail account, the Google search history is opt-in, the Google Talk logging is opt-in, and the Google Desktop features don't work unless you install them on your computer.
If you're worried about what Google will do with your data, it ought to be your responsbility not to hand it over to them.
They're not "my" rooted boxes, they're customer rooted boxes. We don't take responsibility for making sure their boxes are properly updated and secured, but the customers do come complaining to us when they're rooted and when half the apps in/bin don't work anymore wondering why.
No box I've ever administrated has been rooted, and yes, I'm sure.
And sadly, Linux administrators have been unable to suitably protect their systems in all this time, so it continues to be a pain in the ass, never really going away. I work for a hosting company, and I've dug Linux.RST.b out of too many servers.
I think too many Linux admins don't believe there's such a thing as a Linux virus. Usually the easiest way to recognize the infection is if a large number of common programs in/bin like "grep" start crashing. Tends to make boot up and shutdown clumsily fail.
I still get frustrated regularly because they moved the "Device Manager" section up to the top of the SP2 System Control Panel dialog for no obvious reason, when it was in the second section in SP1 and prior.
Slashdot Mirror
The cake was presented during a Peering BoF at the NANOG meeting in Dearborn, MI this week, in reference to a joke on the NANOG mailing list that they had tried everything with Cogent short of baking them a cake.
I was there, and the cake was tasty. :)
The fork was started by contributors to Gaim. Many of them lost interest and time in maintaining the fork, which is why it was encouraged that the improvements get merged back into Gaim so that a larger pool of developers could work on them. That merge never happened and the code bitrotted because there was no agreement that it was what we wanted it to be.
The biggest problem had been deciding what software to use for the backend, and ultimately gstreamer with farsight has been chosen.
The version of Gaim-vv that existed was supporting Yahoo, whereas this time the student is implementing a documented voice and video protocol for XMPP and building the framework into Pidgin onto which other protocols' support may be applied.
Some protocols are still impossible because the codecs required don't exist, aren't stable or aren't in released versions of gstreamer or farsight. That said, from 4 years ago, many more of these things are much better supported on Linux than they used to be. There is apparently a summer of code project out there to create codecs for MSN's video chat requirements, so if that shows up on the scene, it certainly makes Pidgin's job easier.
There's also the issue of how this gstreamer and farsight work will port to Windows, and I don't think we're quite sure yet.
It's not that we don't think this is a good idea, it's just that we don't want it half-assed so we want people who actually care about using the feature to be the ones helping to design it.
Where did you get your php info?
I get mine from phpinfo();
This is common when you use the three-segment versioning method.
If you raise the first number, you are generally doing so to indicate your backwards compatibility is being broken and that you are changing or removing features in addition to adding new ones.
Changing the middle number means you're keeping compatibility with the previous version, but adding new major fuctionality.
Changing the last number means you're just adding patches that do not affect compatibility or features.
And you eventually have to stop supporting your old major version numbers, or you'll be forced to forever maintain multiple trees with substantially different codebases and no one will ever stop using them.
3) Burn down all competing datacentres in your city Most datacenter facilities are made of concrete, brick, and metal, which results in fairly low flammability. Interruption of power (if there are no generators) or network connectivity is likely to be more successful.
Don't use cPanel. While it automates a lot, it also makes lots of arbitrary modifications to the operating system rendering it annoying for use for anything else. Also, it and Plesk install lots and lots of extra things you will never use, wasting disk space and RAM without major tweaking and opening plenty of potential points of intrusion.
I work at a web hosting company and I find InterWorx to be the best at doing a little automation without making a mess of everything.
That said, if you know how to use Linux, don't use a control panel. You'll find it easier to manage things yourself. Short of the MTA, these things are really rather easy to configure.
Firefox 2 sends your URLs to Google if you turn on the feature. It's right there in the preferences, under security. It's even clearly marked to indicate that's what it does: "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery > Check by asking [Google] about each site I visit" So how is the new Firefox more evil?
Trademarks can coexist in separate areas of business.
I hadn't thought about Simsville until it was mentioned a few times here, but I think it's quite plausible. The limited information at the time told us that Simsville would be a SimCity-like game, which basically focused on the citizens of a smaller city, presumably more like a suburb. It was supposedly going to focus more on people than on city planning, so that while you were not micromanaging the days of individual people (as in The Sims), you were also not completely separated from their lives (as in SimCity).
I think some was rolled into SimCity 4, in the sense that it kept much closer track of what the populace was actually doing, so that the simulation was more accurate, but it did not expose the ability to interact with these Sims directly, which I believe Simsville would have done. If indeed that is what SimCity Societies aims to do, then it is basically a resurrection of that concept and I will be as excited about that prospect as I was when they first announced Simsville.
From what I was able to tell based on gameplay, I believe the game did keep track of each individual Sim within the game to a point. The Sim's job, life, etc were not strictly related to their living conditions, but for the purpose of traffic simulation, the game kept track of how many people lived in each building, where each of those people worked (specifically), and what route they took to get to work. Wealth/health/safety was determined on a per-building basis, not a per-sim basis, etc, and I think the game basically just kept track of extended information if you were actually tailing someone. I don't think the people on the sidewalk or the cars on the road really had any correlation to actual people, and would simply represent the state of the tile or a common route passing through the area. I gather this because they would frequently disappear and reappear at random after short trips from a meaningless point A to an equally meaningless point B.
This is mostly speculation, but it seems right based on how I observed the game.
The problem is that names do matter. If you call a game "The Game" and then call your sequel, "The Game II," some people are going to buy "The Game II" simply because they were fans of "The Game," which is now fondly called TG1 for short. If "The Game" was a Greek Mythology Based FPS and "The Game II" is a Monopoly knock-off, that is going to bother some people. (I know, I'm stretching a bit.) :)
It's not so much a problem that this game is called SimCity, but rather that this game is not going to be a sequel in the strictest sense to SimCity 4, and thus the name appears to be somewhat of a misnomer or marketing ploy to get people to buy something that isn't what they want or expected. Obviously anyone really paying attention should be able to tell the difference, and I am not really that upset about the use of the name SimCity, since they seem to be planning not to number it and directly imply a sequential continuation of a series, but rather a concept with a shift ("societies"). I am upset because I wanted a new SimCity game in the sense of what SimCity is now, and that seems to be something that will not happen for now. My worry is that it will never happen again. This does not please me, and I hope you can see why.
Even so, I am not going to write off SimCity Societies. I am angry at it for not being what I wanted, but I am open to the idea that it will still be something that I want. Time will tell.
To my knowledge Will hasn't had a hand in SimCity or The Sims in a while. He's been puttering away in a separate studio for a least a few years on Spore, and possibly some other projects. I haven't exchanged emails with him in many years, but last I was able to get a gauge on things, he was progressing toward less involvement in current games (and their sequels) and more involvement in new ideas. Since then I know that he's moved to that separate studio. EA is controlling The Sims, because it's the most popular franchise, ever. By my guess, EA doesn't want to worry about SimCity because it is a fringe market (though one that is ultimately responsible for The Sims being possible in the first place). I think they prefer (or at least see some value in) keeping the product/franchise alive, but they don't care about it enough anymore to put their own people on the job. As I see it, this pretty much signals the end of days for any even minutely coherent entity named Maxis. The Sims is no longer (but even by initially release was only barely) Maxis, SimCity is no longer Maxis. Maybe Spore is still Maxis, but it if doesn't do well enough, I think that's it for Maxis. :(
That all said, I am glad EA is letting Will Wright exercise his creativity to come up with genuinely new things with his own team, separately from EA's dominant and slave-driving hand, and I'm reasonably sure he had little to no input into this decision, nor any recent decisions regarding The Sims.
A lot of people haven't realized that Pidgin's versioning scheme is actually based upon the API (programming interface). If it breaks binary/API compatibility with a previous release, the major version number has to be incremented. This is what happened when the project went 1.0.0 (it was decided that a new versioning scheme was needed.) There was confusion at that time as well, thinking "Gaim is finally considered stable." It's all about whether you can (theoretically) just plop in a new version of the library and have it still be able to run with plugins/UIs.
:P
There were specific goals for this API/ABI breakage cycle, besides the AOL settlement, which included a vast rewrite of the status (away message, etc) system and its UI, and the completion of the core and UI split, which could not have been easily done without a major version bump. Of course, the API was completely broken by the rename of the internal functions to purple/pidgin/finch. The next major version bump may be relatively (less than 2 years) soon, depending upon how quickly the developers get together the API changing projects they're planning.
Voice support, however, could realistically be in 2.1.0 or 2.2.0 if it doesn't break API and merely adds new functions. I am certainly not promising that, so DON'T MISQUOTE ME.
Of course, the secret list was started on SourceForge because it was needed prior to securing a new server. To try to match your analogy, the elevator was set up such that it didn't stop on any unsecured floors. Generally speaking, if you've got the elevator configured to stop only on certain floors, you don't expect the doors to randomly open elsewhere. It was SourceForge's screwup. They did apologize and they helped fix this issue, but the leak was enough to start the rumor mill, and we were just lucky the settlement was finishing up right then, allowing the announcement to be made before things got completely out of hand.
Part of this apparently is due to legal problems with Gaim which no doubt discouraged the developers. Part of it is Google hiring the lead developer to jump ship and focus primarily on Google Talk.
Sean Egan did not jump ship. He is still in charge of the project and has been managing the whole legal process (and everything related to it) since AOL started going after him.
Stop making excuses, get someone working on VV, even if they don't enjoy it, and get it to work!
This is a damned foolish thing to say, showing complete lack of understanding of open source. It is now YOUR job to implement VV. You may not like it, but I've made up my mind and you seem like the perfect candidate. Get it working, or you'll have to answer to Gaim's vast userbase! Where should I hae users send their complaints?
People working on Gaim do so in their free time for no profit. Why would any one of us want to spend our time doing something we don't like? The mindset that open source software developers should do whatever people demand them to makes no sense. As volunteers, they should have every right to put their free time into the aspects of the software they are interested in and enjoy working on.
If videoconferencing support for Linux is poor, it's because Linux users that want it don't have the means or motivation to implement it. This is not to say that their only choice is to learn to program. They can certainly sponsor a bounty or contribute in other ways, but to demand that volunteers do what you tell them to is a great way to lose volunteers (or to get them to start resenting users of their software).
In open source, contributors get to make the rules. That's just the way it is. If you want products which cater to the features requested by users instead of contributors, consider non-free solutions and be willing to pay for them.
Gaim is very much in favor of doing this implementation correctly, but also, and more importantly, most of the people developing for Gaim don't care about VV support. Keep in mind how open source works. If you want to help VV support along, talk to the developers, find out what kind of plans are already in place, and then write up some patches... or you can certainly fork Gaim, implement VV as crappily as you like, and release it yourself. The friendly approach is preferred and indeed welcome. If someone were contributing acceptable VV support, it would be in Gaim already.
As for the promise of VV in 2.0.0, I don't recall it ever being promised, but even if it was, plans change. The gaim-vv fork which was to be merged into Gaim was deemed unusable due to major changes to the design plan for VV support. It was decided many months ago that VV support would not be in 2.0.0, and would most likely be held over until 3.0.0.
Keep in mind here that versioning in Gaim is API based, so if VV were implemented 4 months after Gaim 2.0.0 came out and didn't break 2.x API compatibility, 2.2 could have VV at that time, or 3.0.0 could be released at that time breaking that compatibility.
Flash 9 is coming.... http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/
I think it's inaccurate to say it remains to be seen if IE7 will change this. Microsoft has released beta 2 to the public and from my limited testing there have already been significant improvements in the renderer. I was pleased to find that my standards-compliant sites without IE hacks already work nearly flawlessly in IE7.
The thing about Google is they make no attempt to hide the fact they are collecting a tremendous amount of data about people and people let them. If you don't want your information stored by Google, you don't opt into any of Google's services. There is nothing compelling you to use a Gmail account, the Google search history is opt-in, the Google Talk logging is opt-in, and the Google Desktop features don't work unless you install them on your computer. If you're worried about what Google will do with your data, it ought to be your responsbility not to hand it over to them.
I don't know where you live, but I don't know a single person that doesn't like Futurama. :)
I rather hope it is standards compliant.
They're not "my" rooted boxes, they're customer rooted boxes. We don't take responsibility for making sure their boxes are properly updated and secured, but the customers do come complaining to us when they're rooted and when half the apps in /bin don't work anymore wondering why.
No box I've ever administrated has been rooted, and yes, I'm sure.
And sadly, Linux administrators have been unable to suitably protect their systems in all this time, so it continues to be a pain in the ass, never really going away. I work for a hosting company, and I've dug Linux.RST.b out of too many servers.
/bin like "grep" start crashing. Tends to make boot up and shutdown clumsily fail.
I think too many Linux admins don't believe there's such a thing as a Linux virus. Usually the easiest way to recognize the infection is if a large number of common programs in
I still get frustrated regularly because they moved the "Device Manager" section up to the top of the SP2 System Control Panel dialog for no obvious reason, when it was in the second section in SP1 and prior.