I gave up on Nintendo when they started to require that I have a Gameboy to be able to play games multiplayer (FF Crystal Chronicles & Zelda 4 Swords).
And you have to have friends! And a GameCube!! And a fuckin' TV!!! And chairs to sit in!!!!
Clearly, Nintendo is just a bunch of money grubbing assholes.
'm sorry, but WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? If you do.Net development in Windows, you use VS. You have no alternative. It's not "not a lot of fun", it's impossible.
The Microsoft®.NET Framework Software Development Kit (SDK) version 1.1 includes everything developers need to write, build, test, and deploy.NET Framework applications--documentation, samples, and command-line tools and compilers.
One might assume, therefore, that it isn't the big initial cost that is the problem, it is the continuing costs of support and code updates for a program that depends on tight (driver-level) access to the kernel, and that could only be shipped as a binary.
Interesting. I was not aware that Apple had done that (are you sure it was QuickTime proper, and not merely quicktime streaming server, which doesn't need Carbon?). At any rate, I do suspect that, as you noted, the cost/difficulty of supporting a binary-only package across a plethora of distributions would be a significant detterent to them; as a company whose selling point is tight, consistent and easy to set up and use software, having to either deal with not having all the needed libraries on a given system or statically linking in everything and offering people a 90 meg iTunes download is not particularly appealing. They'd likely feel that easily broken and/or huge and slow software would be damaging to their image.
You suggested the only things necessary to port iTunes would be changing a couple of kernel calls and solving a few endieness bugs. Implicitly, therefore, you were either trivializing or ignorant of the the fact that an entire UI library port was necessary.
Now even if we would talk about X, what in your valued opinion is the amount of code related to the UI in Carbon which would result in a from scratch port of almost the entire thing?
The vast majority. It's not a lightweight GUI toolkit, but a very baroque, very heavyweight system chalk full of legacy crud. It's a big ass GUI system, an even system, a sound system, etc, etc. It's your standard big pain in the ass port. There's no way Apple could cost-justify porting it to X for the marginal gains from some of the few linux-on-desktop users who won't just bitch about it being "non-free".
That's NOT the whole story -- certain functionality is restricted drivers not marked as "GPL", so there really is an interoperability argument.
The GPL_ONLY symbol exists for the protection of closed-source drivers, because there's no conceivable way for the symbols it's applied to to be used without the result constituting a derived work. It keeps closed-source developers from putting themselves in the position of violating the GPL while still allowing them to write closed-source drivers; it is not about arbitrarily crippling or discouraging closed-source drivers. There's a lot of material on this in the LKML.
This LinuxAnt driver, for instance, doesn't seem to be faking a GPL license to use said functionality; otherwise, this would be a GPL violation story, not a faked-license story.
The GPL is a dscription of terms under which you are granted the right of copying (hence: copyright). It does not (and cannot) compel me to give the source to you in the first place so that you can exercise your right. I can simply claim that the presence of the COPYING file was a mistake corrected in a later release, and nothing more.
You could, perhaps, try to sue me for misleading you (insofar as I led you to believe I would give you the source, when I won't), but you can't sue me for violating my own copyright, and winning said suit would entitle you to damages, not force me to license my code a certain way.
It won't magically refuse to run if your code is under the "wrong" license. It won't call you bad names. All it will do is put a little mark somewhere so that a kernel developer, presented with a dump from this kernel, knows immediately that he doesn't (and can't) have all the sources necessary to hunt down and fix the bug. Otherwise, he could spend hours/days working on it before he relizes this.
A)By faking a GPL license to avoid "tainting" the kernel, the company has made your life more difficult. Problems you have with the kernel won't be supported by developers unless you can recreate the problem without any closed-source modules loaded(otherwise the bug is likely in code they can't fix). Since the module is not marked by the kernel as closed source, unless you remember it is months or years down the road, you may forget that you need to unload it.
B)It wastes time the developers could otherwise be using to improve the kernel. Given a kernel dump that claims to be untainted, they could end up spending days hunting down a bug only to discover that it ultimately lies in a module they can't find source for. If the tainting mechanism had been allowed to work properly, the developer would have asked for a resubmission of the bug without any closed-source modules loaded, to ensure the bug is fixable by them, saving themself days of wasted effort.
What you, and a lot of other people seem to not be understanding is that, if this company hadn't faked the "GPL" line, the modules would still have loaded and worked perfectly. The developers aren't trying to keep closed source drivers from running (far from it), they just want to mark a kernel so that if there's a problem with it, they can save time by having a way to immediately identify whether they are capable of debugging it or not. That benefits everyone.
Personally, I don't see the problem with using binary only drivers.
Neither do the kernel developers; the -great-great-etc-grandparent's assertion that they actively refuse to allow all things closed source was a straw man. All the kernel developers want to be able to do is have the kernel note when it is running a closed-source driver, so that they can easily filter out bug reports that would require them to have access to sources they don't have. They don't want to get blamed for problems caused by someone else's code whom they can't do anything about. Who in the hell can fault them for that?
But then its MY choice, not the kernel nazis. I thought that is what Linux was all about, Free as in speech, not as in beer.
It is your choice. The "kernel nazis" are in whole hearted agreement. They just want to be able to mark kernel dumps from kernels they can't fix. Their choice. Comprende?
You can't "accidentally" GPL code you have the copyright to, because you can't violate your own copyright.
So if I'm the sole copyright holder on software package Foo, and I distribute the binary (sans source) with a file that claims that it's GPL'd, and I subsequently deny any requests for the source, I still can't be forced to provide my code, because I can't violate my own copyright. Similarly, someone who has previously distributed their code under the GPL is well within their rights to relicense said code into Evil Foo License at any time they choose.
well, perhaps not all of Canada, but I have been in IT now for 6 years and never once have received any overtime.
If you're salaried, you're not entitled to overtime. If, on the other hand, you're payed hourly and are working more than 44 hours per week, your employer is legally obligated to pay you time and a half for every hour over that. If this is the case, contact the labour relations board immediately and they will bitchslap your employer through the floor and obtain the outstanding wages owed you.
You've obviously never had to sprint all the way across a large campus in the scant break between classes in order to feed more quarters into a meter. While pre-pay or auto charge meters are also worthy ideas, neither of those are achievable with a 40 year old parking meter either, are they?
In that sense, you no more agree with the parent than I do.
You had a 40 year old parking meter that would let you add more time to it from any other parking meter in the city (rather than having to run across the block/campus/city to that particular parking meter)? And the city could dynamically adjust the rates for a given area of the city in order to curtail congestion patterns??
basically, what MS is hoping for is that Japanese developers will say to themselves "Hey, we're tired of making a profit by selling games for Sony's playstation, let's go make games for the incredibly small XBox market!"?
Gamecube sales in Japan skyrocketed after the release of Tales of Symphonia (most definitely an RPG), which IIRC happened at the same time as a world-wide price cut for the Cube. So good timing and the release of an excellent RPG are why the Cube has been doing well in Japan, along with all their other hugely popular in Japan titles (Pokemon, for instance).
The Yet Another Uninformed, "Japanese Hate American Products" That's Why The XBox Failed Rant.
The truth is, the X-Box failed in Japan because of Microsoft's failure to sufficiently respect the Japanese market, not because of some supposed contempt for all things American on Japan's part.
Think about it: Microsoft was launching a product (whose internal codename was Project Midway, for christ sakes. PR mistake Numero Uno, when that leaked) that was much larger than was convienient for your average Japanese living room, where horizontal space is at a premium vs vertical space (you didn't thing the small horizontal foot prints of the Cube and PS2 (when standing on its side) were an accident, did you?). On top of that, they launched with a very mediocre line up of games that largely didn't appeal to the Japanese market (after all, for a long time Halo was the only bright spot in their US line-up, and First Person Shooters aren't even remotely as popular in Japan as they are here).
These problems probably would have been recoverable by Microsoft, were it not for their fatal mistake: The XBox, on launch in Japan, turned out to have severe problems with its drive; it was scratching the hell out of game discs only days after purchase. Microsoft's response? An imediate recall on first learning of the problem? An immediate apology on the part of MS Japan for the damage done by the machine (the traditional response by a Japanese company in such a situation, and one the public would expect)?
Nope. Just a shitty press release stating "It is up to customers to mail their consoles back to us for repair. The scratch does not affect game playing.", and when the media began reporting this recall they followed it up four days later with the anouncement that "An apparent misinterpretation of information on a Microsoft Japan Web site resulted today in a media report of a recall of Microsoft's Xbox game console in Japan. This report is incorrect. There is no recall of Xbox in Japan or any other market". Fuck you, Japanese consumer.
Selling (what was percieved as) a low quality, defective product to the public and then showing an enormous amount of disrespect for them by failing to own up to and apologize for their mistakes did a hell of a lot more damage to XBox sales than anti-Americanism ever did. Indeed, blaming it on such smacks of the same cultural contempt that led Detroit to attempt to sell cars in Japan in the 80's with the steering wheel on the wrong (left) side of the vehicle, and then blame their lack of success on Japanese people hating American products. The lesson, therefore, isn't the ignorant and trite canard that "Japanese hate American products" but rather the same as the lesson of failing products everywhere: Know your market, and respect what they prefer rather than expecting them to want what you tell them to want.
However, Eggebrecht was quick to dispel any "doom" that might surround Factor 5's announcement. Echoing Silicon Knights founder Denis Dyack, he emphasized his enthusiasm for Nintendo's future console efforts. "We are extremely excited about both DS and GCNext, so any talk of us abandoning Nintendo platforms altogether is just not true," he told GameSpot.
They're still doing development for Nintendo, they've simply ceased dev on all current hardware, Nintendo or otherwise.
The anti-Nintendo fanboyism gets a bit thick around here, sometimes.
I mean, the Japanese may well consider LA porn to be barbaric and offensive (you can see pubic hair?)
I'm not sure that the culture that created "Max Hardcore" has any business commenting on the supposed strangeness of other country's porn. Who was the comedian who said "The first time I saw
a Max Hardcore film, I didn't know whether to jerk off or call the cops"?
Most of the oft-sighted strangeness of Japanese porn either has a direct analogue in our porn, or is otherwise a product of the strange obscenity laws imposed there.
I've read that while computers can offer a credible competition to even a Chessmater, there is no current "go" program that can challenge a true master of that game.
Forget true master, no current GO program can challenge much more than a raw n00b at the game. The highest rated programs are around 10 - 15 kyu, which is to say they play better than a rank amateur, but not by a lot, and suffer from the fact that they can be confused into making horrible moves if you exploit certain flaws in their AI. Once you learn what moves exploit their weaknesses, you'll beat them everytime no matter how bad you are.
A huge branching factor and the lack of anything remotely approaching a clear evaluation algorithm will probably hamper computer Go for years to come.
If Anna Nicole Smith wasn't so God awfully stupid, she would have been the perfect Samus. We need a smart, tough, busty woman with a nice rump to play Samus.
I'm thinking that Lynn McCrossin [pecpanther.com] would be a good candidate.
o_O
If there's one thing reading these "if I were in charge of the movie, I'd do this..." posts on slashdot should convince us all of, it's that we should all be glad that none of the people on slashdot are in charge of the movie.
Slashdot Mirror
I gave up on Nintendo when they started to require that I have a Gameboy to be able to play games multiplayer (FF Crystal Chronicles & Zelda 4 Swords).
And you have to have friends! And a GameCube!! And a fuckin' TV!!! And chairs to sit in!!!!
Clearly, Nintendo is just a bunch of money grubbing assholes.
'm sorry, but WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? If you do .Net development in Windows, you use VS. You have no alternative. It's not "not a lot of fun", it's impossible.
.NET Framework Software Development Kit (SDK) version 1.1 includes everything developers need to write, build, test, and deploy .NET Framework applications--documentation, samples, and command-line tools and compilers.
Wrong:
The Microsoft®
One might assume, therefore, that it isn't the big initial cost that is the problem, it is the continuing costs of support and code updates for a program that depends on tight (driver-level) access to the kernel, and that could only be shipped as a binary.
Interesting. I was not aware that Apple had done that (are you sure it was QuickTime proper, and not merely quicktime streaming server, which doesn't need Carbon?). At any rate, I do suspect that, as you noted, the cost/difficulty of supporting a binary-only package across a plethora of distributions would be a significant detterent to them; as a company whose selling point is tight, consistent and easy to set up and use software, having to either deal with not having all the needed libraries on a given system or statically linking in everything and offering people a 90 meg iTunes download is not particularly appealing. They'd likely feel that easily broken and/or huge and slow software would be damaging to their image.
Did I say anything about X? No.
You suggested the only things necessary to port iTunes would be changing a couple of kernel calls and solving a few endieness bugs. Implicitly, therefore, you were either trivializing or ignorant of the the fact that an entire UI library port was necessary.
Now even if we would talk about X, what in your valued opinion is the amount of code related to the UI in Carbon which would result in a from scratch port of almost the entire thing?
The vast majority. It's not a lightweight GUI toolkit, but a very baroque, very heavyweight system chalk full of legacy crud. It's a big ass GUI system, an even system, a sound system, etc, etc. It's your standard big pain in the ass port. There's no way Apple could cost-justify porting it to X for the marginal gains from some of the few linux-on-desktop users who won't just bitch about it being "non-free".
The only nightmarish thing about this is litte endian vs. big endian and maybe some Mach specific calls.
Because porting Carbon to X would be a cakewalk. Not.
You do realize Mac OS X's native GUI library is not in any way related to X, yes? They'd be doing a from scratch port of almost the entire thing.
That's NOT the whole story -- certain functionality is restricted drivers not marked as "GPL", so there really is an interoperability argument.
The GPL_ONLY symbol exists for the protection of closed-source drivers, because there's no conceivable way for the symbols it's applied to to be used without the result constituting a derived work. It keeps closed-source developers from putting themselves in the position of violating the GPL while still allowing them to write closed-source drivers; it is not about arbitrarily crippling or discouraging closed-source drivers. There's a lot of material on this in the LKML.
This LinuxAnt driver, for instance, doesn't seem to be faking a GPL license to use said functionality; otherwise, this would be a GPL violation story, not a faked-license story.
The GPL is a dscription of terms under which you are granted the right of copying (hence: copyright). It does not (and cannot) compel me to give the source to you in the first place so that you can exercise your right. I can simply claim that the presence of the COPYING file was a mistake corrected in a later release, and nothing more.
You could, perhaps, try to sue me for misleading you (insofar as I led you to believe I would give you the source, when I won't), but you can't sue me for violating my own copyright, and winning said suit would entitle you to damages, not force me to license my code a certain way.
It won't magically refuse to run if your code is under the "wrong" license. It won't call you bad names. All it will do is put a little mark somewhere so that a kernel developer, presented with a dump from this kernel, knows immediately that he doesn't (and can't) have all the sources necessary to hunt down and fix the bug. Otherwise, he could spend hours/days working on it before he relizes this.
The only reasons you should care are
A)By faking a GPL license to avoid "tainting" the kernel, the company has made your life more difficult. Problems you have with the kernel won't be supported by developers unless you can recreate the problem without any closed-source modules loaded(otherwise the bug is likely in code they can't fix). Since the module is not marked by the kernel as closed source, unless you remember it is months or years down the road, you may forget that you need to unload it.
B)It wastes time the developers could otherwise be using to improve the kernel. Given a kernel dump that claims to be untainted, they could end up spending days hunting down a bug only to discover that it ultimately lies in a module they can't find source for. If the tainting mechanism had been allowed to work properly, the developer would have asked for a resubmission of the bug without any closed-source modules loaded, to ensure the bug is fixable by them, saving themself days of wasted effort.
What you, and a lot of other people seem to not be understanding is that, if this company hadn't faked the "GPL" line, the modules would still have loaded and worked perfectly. The developers aren't trying to keep closed source drivers from running (far from it), they just want to mark a kernel so that if there's a problem with it, they can save time by having a way to immediately identify whether they are capable of debugging it or not. That benefits everyone.
Personally, I don't see the problem with using binary only drivers.
Neither do the kernel developers; the -great-great-etc-grandparent's assertion that they actively refuse to allow all things closed source was a straw man. All the kernel developers want to be able to do is have the kernel note when it is running a closed-source driver, so that they can easily filter out bug reports that would require them to have access to sources they don't have. They don't want to get blamed for problems caused by someone else's code whom they can't do anything about. Who in the hell can fault them for that?
But then its MY choice, not the kernel nazis. I thought that is what Linux was all about, Free as in speech, not as in beer.
It is your choice. The "kernel nazis" are in whole hearted agreement. They just want to be able to mark kernel dumps from kernels they can't fix. Their choice. Comprende?
You can't "accidentally" GPL code you have the copyright to, because you can't violate your own copyright.
So if I'm the sole copyright holder on software package Foo, and I distribute the binary (sans source) with a file that claims that it's GPL'd, and I subsequently deny any requests for the source, I still can't be forced to provide my code, because I can't violate my own copyright. Similarly, someone who has previously distributed their code under the GPL is well within their rights to relicense said code into Evil Foo License at any time they choose.
well, perhaps not all of Canada, but I have been in IT now for 6 years and never once have received any overtime.
If you're salaried, you're not entitled to overtime. If, on the other hand, you're payed hourly and are working more than 44 hours per week, your employer is legally obligated to pay you time and a half for every hour over that. If this is the case, contact the labour relations board immediately and they will bitchslap your employer through the floor and obtain the outstanding wages owed you.
You've obviously never had to sprint all the way across a large campus in the scant break between classes in order to feed more quarters into a meter. While pre-pay or auto charge meters are also worthy ideas, neither of those are achievable with a 40 year old parking meter either, are they?
In that sense, you no more agree with the parent than I do.
You had a 40 year old parking meter that would let you add more time to it from any other parking meter in the city (rather than having to run across the block/campus/city to that particular parking meter)? And the city could dynamically adjust the rates for a given area of the city in order to curtail congestion patterns??
That's incredible!
basically, what MS is hoping for is that Japanese developers will say to themselves "Hey, we're tired of making a profit by selling games for Sony's playstation, let's go make games for the incredibly small XBox market!"?
Good luck with that one, guys.
Gamecube sales in Japan skyrocketed after the release of Tales of Symphonia (most definitely an RPG), which IIRC happened at the same time as a world-wide price cut for the Cube. So good timing and the release of an excellent RPG are why the Cube has been doing well in Japan, along with all their other hugely popular in Japan titles (Pokemon, for instance).
The Yet Another Uninformed, "Japanese Hate American Products" That's Why The XBox Failed Rant.
The truth is, the X-Box failed in Japan because of Microsoft's failure to sufficiently respect the Japanese market, not because of some supposed contempt for all things American on Japan's part.
Think about it: Microsoft was launching a product (whose internal codename was Project Midway, for christ sakes. PR mistake Numero Uno, when that leaked) that was much larger than was convienient for your average Japanese living room, where horizontal space is at a premium vs vertical space (you didn't thing the small horizontal foot prints of the Cube and PS2 (when standing on its side) were an accident, did you?). On top of that, they launched with a very mediocre line up of games that largely didn't appeal to the Japanese market (after all, for a long time Halo was the only bright spot in their US line-up, and First Person Shooters aren't even remotely as popular in Japan as they are here).
These problems probably would have been recoverable by Microsoft, were it not for their fatal mistake: The XBox, on launch in Japan, turned out to have severe problems with its drive; it was scratching the hell out of game discs only days after purchase. Microsoft's response? An imediate recall on first learning of the problem? An immediate apology on the part of MS Japan for the damage done by the machine (the traditional response by a Japanese company in such a situation, and one the public would expect)?
Nope. Just a shitty press release stating "It is up to customers to mail their consoles back to us for repair. The scratch does not affect game playing.", and when the media began reporting this recall they followed it up four days later with the anouncement that "An apparent misinterpretation of information on a Microsoft Japan Web site resulted today in a media report of a recall of Microsoft's Xbox game console in Japan. This report is incorrect. There is no recall of Xbox in Japan or any other market". Fuck you, Japanese consumer.
Selling (what was percieved as) a low quality, defective product to the public and then showing an enormous amount of disrespect for them by failing to own up to and apologize for their mistakes did a hell of a lot more damage to XBox sales than anti-Americanism ever did. Indeed, blaming it on such smacks of the same cultural contempt that led Detroit to attempt to sell cars in Japan in the 80's with the steering wheel on the wrong (left) side of the vehicle, and then blame their lack of success on Japanese people hating American products. The lesson, therefore, isn't the ignorant and trite canard that "Japanese hate American products" but rather the same as the lesson of failing products everywhere: Know your market, and respect what they prefer rather than expecting them to want what you tell them to want.
Damn, if only I knew the title of that song...
Hold your phone up to the screen. Duh.
It's not violating any laws of thermodynamics, it's violating the law of conservation of energy.
Last time I checked, The Law of Conservation of Energy is one of the Laws of Thermodynamics. More specifically, it's the first one.
However, Eggebrecht was quick to dispel any "doom" that might surround Factor 5's announcement. Echoing Silicon Knights founder Denis Dyack, he emphasized his enthusiasm for Nintendo's future console efforts. "We are extremely excited about both DS and GCNext, so any talk of us abandoning Nintendo platforms altogether is just not true," he told GameSpot.
They're still doing development for Nintendo, they've simply ceased dev on all current hardware, Nintendo or otherwise.
The anti-Nintendo fanboyism gets a bit thick around here, sometimes.
I mean, the Japanese may well consider LA porn to be barbaric and offensive (you can see pubic hair?)
I'm not sure that the culture that created "Max Hardcore" has any business commenting on the supposed strangeness of other country's porn. Who was the comedian who said "The first time I saw a Max Hardcore film, I didn't know whether to jerk off or call the cops"?
Most of the oft-sighted strangeness of Japanese porn either has a direct analogue in our porn, or is otherwise a product of the strange obscenity laws imposed there.
Just wait 'till they start displaying ads based on the radio station/CD/MP3/WMV/AAC you happen to be listening to at the time.
/. about it.
Already happening.
There was even a story here on
I've read that while computers can offer a credible competition to even a Chessmater, there is no current "go" program that can challenge a true master of that game.
Forget true master, no current GO program can challenge much more than a raw n00b at the game. The highest rated programs are around 10 - 15 kyu, which is to say they play better than a rank amateur, but not by a lot, and suffer from the fact that they can be confused into making horrible moves if you exploit certain flaws in their AI. Once you learn what moves exploit their weaknesses, you'll beat them everytime no matter how bad you are.
A huge branching factor and the lack of anything remotely approaching a clear evaluation algorithm will probably hamper computer Go for years to come.
If Anna Nicole Smith wasn't so God awfully stupid, she would have been the perfect Samus. We need a smart, tough, busty woman with a nice rump to play Samus. I'm thinking that Lynn McCrossin [pecpanther.com] would be a good candidate.
o_O
If there's one thing reading these "if I were in charge of the movie, I'd do this..." posts on slashdot should convince us all of, it's that we should all be glad that none of the people on slashdot are in charge of the movie.
That should read "Yes, but MS won..."