I used to be able to choose a public-domain one (NTSC) but now it requires a patent to do the same thing.
NTSC is RCA television - and remained RCA through the introduction of color. There were significant bit players like DuMont in the early days, of course. But Sarnoff held all the cards which mattered. You can call NTSC "public domain" if you like, but the realities of patents, tech, politics and power were perfectly clear at the time.
Imagine a world in which your DVD rip was uniquely tagged - and every download of the movie points back to you as the primary source.
Imagine that the licensed distributor has real numbers to take into court - and is suing you for the wholesale value of the distribution - plus punitive damages.
The numbers add up really, really, fast.
With no statutory limit on damages, you must settle the case out of court or risk taking the full whack.
In the real world of civil law, the burden of proof is much lighter.
The rights holder doesn't have to trace the movement of every file. He only has to persuade the jury that the bill has come due and that you owe him - big time.
The other side of the coin, of course, is that the good guy - the geek - isn't always the defendant.
He is sometimes the plaintiff - whose only realistic hope of recovery is through the imposition of statutory damages.
The problem is, what we remember as a game will return as a product of the entertainment industry.
You only need to look at the production credits. The art. The writing. The music. The vocal talent.
These are pros, man.
You don't play "Grim Fandango" for the puzzles it offers.
You play it for the stories it offers.
It shone pale as bone, As I stood there alone. And I thought to myself, How the Moon that night, Cast its light, To my heart's true delight, On the reef, Where her body was strewn.
He also knows his school district better than we do. These decisions are never made in a vacuum.
I would question pursuing the Linux or Open Source solution if others do the job better. It's the safety of your kid that matters here - not your own political correctness.
"Free as in Speech" vs "Free as in Beer" aspect. Its still one of the hardest things for people to grasp, which is sad since a lot of the fools having problems with it are from the US which is nicknamed "Land of the Free" for crying out loud.
An American's understanding of "Free Speech" is anchored in secure, open and fearless political debate.
In the work of the artist and writer.
But there is a strong underlying sense of property even here.
Ownership. Possession - and Profit.
America remains in many ways an elementally capitalist society - and from long experience quite cynical.
An American thinks in terms of the deal. The bargain.
He always counts the cost."
When he sees a sign that promises "Free Beer!" he translates it instantly into a sign that reads "Free Bunnies! Free Kittens!"
He knows when beer is on the table it comes at the price of a four-hour speech.
"We should recontribute so that someone else can make IMPROVEMENTS on our modifications that we can then use without having to pay for it." You need to communicate to them that there are people out there who...will make other changes that you would not have thought of, but that you can benefit from.
They may be out there.
That doesn't mean they aren't working for your competitors and keeping their changes in house.
Sometimes the ball just lies there dead.
You can't promise your boss that opening the code will yield a timely - and significant - return.
I don't believe it was a machine gun, but a breech-loading rifle. Had it been mass produced, the British would have wiped the Americans of the face of the map.
One of Arthur Clarke's early and best stories is a cautionary tale on the hazards of introducing newly developed weapons in wartime.
They don't arrive on the battlefield as quickly as you hoped.
In the numbers that you hoped.
You will be drawing experienced troops off the line and back into training.
The basic concept may be seriously flawed or you will pay dearly for the simplest of mistakes when the weapon was rushed into design and production.
Historians will regard your new weapon as a historical turning point. The first ground-support combat aircraft. The first helicopter. But it won't be decisive today.
If you go back, before the rise of the automobile, you'll find trolleys in many major American cities. Check the history of your own town. Did it have trolleys? If so, where did they go?
More or less where the primary bus lines run now and the horse cars ran a generation earlier. There would be some suburban services and quite likely a lake shore trolley park.
The trolley ran down the center of the street. It could be a brutally congested and dangerous environment downtown. Boarding the trolley was not half so easy or as much fun as the movie makes it.
You need to think big city - a working class city - Buffalo, Chicago.
To make financial sense a mass transit line has always needed to move a lot of people within a relatively confined and manageable space.
Why did the Federal Government decide to commit it's resources to an Interstate Highway System rather than an Interstate Rail System?
Because we already had an interstate rail system.
Rail is very good at moving bulk freight. Industrial feed stocks. The mile long unit train that moves nothing but coal from the mine to the power plant.
But on a smaller scale - portal to portal - the car or the truck is likely be at least as fast and far more flexible.
Why do passenger trains criss cross Europe and Japan, but not the United States?
Passenger rail needs a relatively short, high density, corridor to be profitable. Boston - New York - Washington.
The geek needs to think more clearly about American geography. How our cities and transport systems evolved.
The Great Lakes and the Mohawk Valley encouraged deep penetration inland.
But the natural trade routes are almost entirely north-south.
The Atlantic Coast. The Mississippi Valley. The Pacific Coast. The Appalachians and the Rockies were always significant barriers.
The Hispanic will be reminded of El Camino Real - the Mission Trai. El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro - the road to Mexico City.
Criss-crossing the United States has never been an easy problem to solve.
Maybe you can explain why I'd want to buy an HDTV with all of the accoutrements rather than buy a vastly cheaper flat panel display, and use it with my far more flexible computer.
You'll have a social life. Big picture. Big sound. It's a big draw.
And just for the record, I don't own a car, I bike to work or ride the subway.
The timeline here is tightly compressed.
The modern "safety" bicycle became popular in the 1890s. The safety bicycle helped make "good roads" and personal transportation a socially and politically potent ideal.
The first American subway opens in Boston in 1897. Inner city electric trolley lines and commuter heavy-rail electric service can be more or less correctly placed here as well.
The automobile enters the picture at a time of great experimentation and none of the alternatives are well-anchored.
We could have moved from horse and carriage to a decent bus service and taxis as needed. And if we had done en masse, they'd both be much cheaper than what we pay for a journey today. But no - there was big money to be made in everyone having their own car and the public lapped it up.
The cost of owning and operating a Model T Ford was about 1 cent a mile.
The token cost 5 cents.
The transit services were in huge, huge financial trouble before World War One.
The product they were offering was not want people wanted.
If your were black, you could be denied a hotel room, an apartment, forced to the back of the bus. But you could own a decent car.
Convenience. Security. Privacy. Pride.
Don't think those lessons were lost on others.
The invention of the tractor could have meant much more leisure time for a society that had a large agricultural base, but instead, due to unequal wealth distribution, it just meant one person working even longer hours and a lot of people desperately trying to find something else to do
The John Deere tractor with the power take-off, the hydraulic lift and the three-point hitch is the iconic image of the American family farm.
Hours are long in farming because of the intractable and contrarian nature of plant and animal. Sun and soil. Wind and weather.
Nothing will bend to your convenience.
The old-time farmer bought his first tractor because his eldest son laid down the law: we get rid of the horses or I take that job in town - or at least that was the story he tried to peddle to his wife when she asked about the bill.
I have read that the average person with a car today spends more time in transit than did people of antiquity
Well, of course he does.
There is an old saying - Indian, I believe - that language changes every twenty-five miles.
Unless you lived as a nomad - followed the herds of elk or buffalo - you lived and died within that fixed twenty-five circle through almost the whole of human history.
The average person of antiquity couldn't afford to keep a horse. That put you in the Equine class. The minimum financial requirement for entry into the Senate.
The average person of antiquity didn't have the right to travel. He was bound to the land or to his craft.
The road is a military road. The rider an imperial courier.
I'll never understand how a geek could even - think - that allowing the EU bureaucrat to decide what can and cannot be included in a standard OS distribution was a good idea.
The political winds shift and Ubuntu is in his sights now.
I do, because I'd rather be able to develop to standards and I'd rather Web technologies could move forward again instead of being held back by one, dominant, least common denominator browser.
Imagine that a company - call it Big G or Big M - releases a new browser - or rather something much than a browser.
It gains traction in the market. The driving force behind its adoption is moving quickly, ruthlessly, in its quest for market share.
The standards committee is sullen, fragmented, slow to react. Riven by ideological divisions that have become increasingly arcane and incomprehensible even to their adherents.
Does any of this sound familiar?
The entrepreneur flies hypersonic. The committee takes the local out of Hampstead. The slow boat from China. The boat with the solar panels and the polyester sail - Linux controlled - that on good day can be driven to a blistering six knots.
The Mozilla Foundation makes many tens of millions of dollars from Google. If nobody installs Firefox, Google isn't going to be giving them that kind of money anymore.
Now that Google has its own platform in Chrome why does it need Mozilla?
Why do you think they are so ready to advertise running Windows on your mac? They don't care if you don't use OS X, they just want you to buy their computers.
Please.
There is typically one - and only one - way to get a Mac on your 9 to 5 desktop and that is by running the Windows software that is essential to your business or profession.
The geek off-hours may love the challenge of maintaining three or four operating systems and their associated program libraries as they run on virtual machines.
The IT pro or the kid manning the Help Desk not so much.
You don't do this unless you absolutely have to. You don't sell it as a feature unless it is the only way to get your foot in the door.
That is why your corporate customers get 32 bit XP-Pro free with Win 7.
Not a good idea though. Remember that the ultimate goal of any commercial game is to make lots of money. They cost a lot to develop, you want a big return.
"The Matrix" is fundamentally no different from Disney's online "Pirates of the Carribbean." When the big tent comes down and the franchise grows cold you are the last living cell in the dead body.
The franchise product that is solidly anchored is rare.
The iconic DC Comic character exists in recognizable form as early as 1940. He will have a had a long career in radio, the movies and TV. He will have found an adept and sympathetic chronicler in a contemporary artist and writer like Frank Miller - and in later films like The Dark Knight. That is a foundation on which you can build with some confidence.
UO was a very early MMO and had/has a great many problems by today's standards. None the less, there are still over 100,000 subscribers
Games like Ultima Online and Everquest are the originals, the archeytpes. They have their own history, their own story.
They owe nothing to no one. That is their strength.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to be able to choose a public-domain one (NTSC) but now it requires a patent to do the same thing.
NTSC is RCA television - and remained RCA through the introduction of color. There were significant bit players like DuMont in the early days, of course. But Sarnoff held all the cards which mattered. You can call NTSC "public domain" if you like, but the realities of patents, tech, politics and power were perfectly clear at the time.
Imagine a world in which your DVD rip was uniquely tagged - and every download of the movie points back to you as the primary source.
Imagine that the licensed distributor has real numbers to take into court - and is suing you for the wholesale value of the distribution - plus punitive damages.
The numbers add up really, really, fast.
With no statutory limit on damages, you must settle the case out of court or risk taking the full whack.
In the real world of civil law, the burden of proof is much lighter.
The rights holder doesn't have to trace the movement of every file. He only has to persuade the jury that the bill has come due and that you owe him - big time.
The other side of the coin, of course, is that the good guy - the geek - isn't always the defendant.
He is sometimes the plaintiff - whose only realistic hope of recovery is through the imposition of statutory damages.
The problem is, what we remember as a game will return as a product of the entertainment industry.
You only need to look at the production credits. The art. The writing. The music. The vocal talent.
These are pros, man.
You don't play "Grim Fandango" for the puzzles it offers.
You play it for the stories it offers.
It shone pale as bone,
As I stood there alone.
And I thought to myself,
How the Moon that night,
Cast its light,
To my heart's true delight,
On the reef,
Where her body was strewn.
He knows his daughter better than we all do.
He also knows his school district better than we do. These decisions are never made in a vacuum.
I would question pursuing the Linux or Open Source solution if others do the job better. It's the safety of your kid that matters here - not your own political correctness.
Well, they did release Bob.
I would like to introduce you to that graveyard of good intentions which is known as Sourceforge.net.
If you think of Bob simply as an animated guide or avatar he seems he seems to found a home in social networking and PC gaming.
"Free as in Speech" vs "Free as in Beer" aspect. Its still one of the hardest things for people to grasp, which is sad since a lot of the fools having problems with it are from the US which is nicknamed "Land of the Free" for crying out loud.
An American's understanding of "Free Speech" is anchored in secure, open and fearless political debate.
In the work of the artist and writer.
But there is a strong underlying sense of property even here.
Ownership. Possession - and Profit.
America remains in many ways an elementally capitalist society - and from long experience quite cynical.
An American thinks in terms of the deal. The bargain.
He always counts the cost."
When he sees a sign that promises "Free Beer!" he translates it instantly into a sign that reads "Free Bunnies! Free Kittens!"
He knows when beer is on the table it comes at the price of a four-hour speech.
"We should recontribute so that someone else can make IMPROVEMENTS on our modifications that we can then use without having to pay for it." You need to communicate to them that there are people out there who...will make other changes that you would not have thought of, but that you can benefit from.
They may be out there.
That doesn't mean they aren't working for your competitors and keeping their changes in house.
Sometimes the ball just lies there dead.
You can't promise your boss that opening the code will yield a timely - and significant - return.
I don't believe it was a machine gun, but a breech-loading rifle. Had it been mass produced, the British would have wiped the Americans of the face of the map.
One of Arthur Clarke's early and best stories is a cautionary tale on the hazards of introducing newly developed weapons in wartime.
They don't arrive on the battlefield as quickly as you hoped.
In the numbers that you hoped.
You will be drawing experienced troops off the line and back into training.
The basic concept may be seriously flawed or you will pay dearly for the simplest of mistakes when the weapon was rushed into design and production.
Historians will regard your new weapon as a historical turning point. The first ground-support combat aircraft. The first helicopter. But it won't be decisive today.
More or less where the primary bus lines run now and the horse cars ran a generation earlier. There would be some suburban services and quite likely a lake shore trolley park.
The trolley ran down the center of the street. It could be a brutally congested and dangerous environment downtown. Boarding the trolley was not half so easy or as much fun as the movie makes it.
You need to think big city - a working class city - Buffalo, Chicago.
To make financial sense a mass transit line has always needed to move a lot of people within a relatively confined and manageable space.
Why did the Federal Government decide to commit it's resources to an Interstate Highway System rather than an Interstate Rail System?
Because we already had an interstate rail system.
Rail is very good at moving bulk freight.
Industrial feed stocks.
The mile long unit train that moves nothing but coal from the mine to the power plant.
But on a smaller scale - portal to portal - the car or the truck is likely be at least as fast and far more flexible.
Why do passenger trains criss cross Europe and Japan, but not the United States?
Passenger rail needs a relatively short, high density, corridor to be profitable.
Boston - New York - Washington.
The geek needs to think more clearly about American geography. How our cities and transport systems evolved.
The Great Lakes and the Mohawk Valley encouraged deep penetration inland.
But the natural trade routes are almost entirely north-south.
The Atlantic Coast. The Mississippi Valley. The Pacific Coast. The Appalachians and the Rockies were always significant barriers.
The Hispanic will be reminded of El Camino Real - the Mission Trai. El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro - the road to Mexico City.
Criss-crossing the United States has never been an easy problem to solve.
The article gives the nod to Lotus 1-2-3 over VisiCalc?
The fundamental problem is that the Apple II was an eminently lousy platform for office work - and never gained much traction there.
Those two games introduced me to computers
Oregon Trail still ranks high on the Amazon best seller lists.
Games like Flight Simulator, Commander Keen and King's Quest demonstrated that the IBM PC was a viable gaming platform.
The geek still cherishes the notion that whatever success Linux achieves in the office can be carried over into the home.
But these markets diverged much earlier and more decisively than he remembers.
I was on Amazon surfing for a book called The Multiorgasmic Man: Sexual Secrets Every Man Should Know
Was it any good?
If it was, would he be spending his weekends posting to Slashdot?
activeX malware and exploitation worms made huge difference in our lives
Have they really?
I sometimes wonder.
Of the billion or so PC users on the planet, about 900 million or so run Windows. They are productive at work. They have fun at home.
It struck me that over the past no "household appliance" has troubled me less over the last fifteen years than the Windows PC.
You'll have a social life. Big picture. Big sound. It's a big draw.
And just for the record, I don't own a car, I bike to work or ride the subway.
The timeline here is tightly compressed.
The modern "safety" bicycle became popular in the 1890s.
The safety bicycle helped make "good roads" and personal transportation a socially and politically potent ideal.
The first American subway opens in Boston in 1897.
Inner city electric trolley lines and commuter heavy-rail electric service can be more or less correctly placed here as well.
The automobile enters the picture at a time of great experimentation and none of the alternatives are well-anchored.
Membership in the Senate required ownership of land property equivalent in value to 1,000,000 sesterces.
I should have been more careful about that.
But in any pre-industrial society owning a horse - or, perhaps, more properly, a stable - would have put you well above the commons.
We could have moved from horse and carriage to a decent bus service and taxis as needed. And if we had done en masse, they'd both be much cheaper than what we pay for a journey today. But no - there was big money to be made in everyone having their own car and the public lapped it up.
The cost of owning and operating a Model T Ford was about 1 cent a mile.
The token cost 5 cents.
The transit services were in huge, huge financial trouble before World War One.
The product they were offering was not want people wanted.
If your were black, you could be denied a hotel room, an apartment, forced to the back of the bus. But you could own a decent car.
Convenience. Security. Privacy. Pride.
Don't think those lessons were lost on others.
The invention of the tractor could have meant much more leisure time for a society that had a large agricultural base, but instead, due to unequal wealth distribution, it just meant one person working even longer hours and a lot of people desperately trying to find something else to do
The John Deere tractor with the power take-off, the hydraulic lift and the three-point hitch is the iconic image of the American family farm.
Hours are long in farming because of the intractable and contrarian nature of plant and animal. Sun and soil. Wind and weather.
Nothing will bend to your convenience.
The old-time farmer bought his first tractor because his eldest son laid down the law:
we get rid of the horses or I take that job in town - or at least that was the story he tried to peddle to his wife when she asked about the bill.
I have read that the average person with a car today spends more time in transit than did people of antiquity
Well, of course he does.
There is an old saying - Indian, I believe - that language changes every twenty-five miles.
Unless you lived as a nomad - followed the herds of elk or buffalo - you lived and died within that fixed twenty-five circle through almost the whole of human history.
The average person of antiquity couldn't afford to keep a horse.
That put you in the Equine class. The minimum financial requirement for entry into the Senate.
The average person of antiquity didn't have the right to travel. He was bound to the land or to his craft.
The road is a military road. The rider an imperial courier.
Which browser do you want?
I'll never understand how a geek could even - think - that allowing the EU bureaucrat to decide what can and cannot be included in a standard OS distribution was a good idea.
The political winds shift and Ubuntu is in his sights now.
I do, because I'd rather be able to develop to standards and I'd rather Web technologies could move forward again instead of being held back by one, dominant, least common denominator browser.
Imagine that a company - call it Big G or Big M - releases a new browser -
or rather something much than a browser.
It gains traction in the market. The driving force behind its adoption is moving quickly, ruthlessly, in its quest for market share.
The standards committee is sullen, fragmented, slow to react. Riven by ideological divisions that have become increasingly arcane and incomprehensible even to their adherents.
Does any of this sound familiar?
The entrepreneur flies hypersonic. The committee takes the local out of Hampstead. The slow boat from China. The boat with the solar panels and the polyester sail - Linux controlled - that on good day can be driven to a blistering six knots.
The Mozilla Foundation makes many tens of millions of dollars from Google. If nobody installs Firefox, Google isn't going to be giving them that kind of money anymore.
Now that Google has its own platform in Chrome why does it need Mozilla?
Most people who want a $500 computer is not going to build it, they want plug and play.
Most people aren't going to build. Period.
The laptop. The mini or ultra-mini case. These are killing the DIY market. Which has always been a niche market.
Why do you think they are so ready to advertise running Windows on your mac? They don't care if you don't use OS X, they just want you to buy their computers.
Please.
There is typically one - and only one - way to get a Mac on your 9 to 5 desktop and that is by running the Windows software that is essential to your business or profession.
The geek off-hours may love the challenge of maintaining three or four operating systems and their associated program libraries as they run on virtual machines.
The IT pro or the kid manning the Help Desk not so much.
You don't do this unless you absolutely have to. You don't sell it as a feature unless it is the only way to get your foot in the door.
That is why your corporate customers get 32 bit XP-Pro free with Win 7.
Not a good idea though. Remember that the ultimate goal of any commercial game is to make lots of money. They cost a lot to develop, you want a big return.
"The Matrix" is fundamentally no different from Disney's online "Pirates of the Carribbean." When the big tent comes down and the franchise grows cold you are the last living cell in the dead body.
The franchise product that is solidly anchored is rare.
The iconic DC Comic character exists in recognizable form as early as 1940. He will have a had a long career in radio, the movies and TV. He will have found an adept and sympathetic chronicler in a contemporary artist and writer like Frank Miller - and in later films like The Dark Knight. That is a foundation on which you can build with some confidence.
UO was a very early MMO and had/has a great many problems by today's standards. None the less, there are still over 100,000 subscribers
Games like Ultima Online and Everquest are the originals, the archeytpes. They have their own history, their own story.
They owe nothing to no one. That is their strength.
Most netbooks exceed the capabilities of full business laptops from just four years ago
Most netbooks sold in the developed world.
But that isn't SE's primary market.
Microsoft just doesn't like the idea of cheap computers where they will struggle to compete with their expensive OS.
The Linux netbook is "Not sold in stores." Netbooks
You know you've hit rock bottom when you're given the boot - pounded into the alsphalt - by the granny greeters at WalMart.