"Fair use" means much more than teachers running photocopiers.
However, if you only read the law text, you won't see fair use defined- that concept was added later by the court system. In the interpretation of judges, copyright law violated Constitutional right to free speech, so copyright cannot restrict materials from being "fairly used" for protected speech.
Parody is explicitly declared as a form of fair use in some legal decisions, like the Luther Campbell vs 2LiveCrew case.
An "idea" is almost anything that a human can think of. ("Idea" doesn't necessarily imply that it was original or creative. From a dictionary: "something that exists in the mind". A phone number I've memorized for 10 minutes? It's technically an "idea")
All "expressions of ideas" are in themselves "ideas" (a person can study an expression and bring it into her mind, causing it to meet the definition of "idea"). Some ideas are too vague to copyright, but if they're made more explicit and detailed, then they also qualify as expressed, and are protected.
The statement "Copyright protects a specific expression of an idea, and nothing more." is either false, or too vague to be meaningful (depending on how you choose to define "idea", which is a tough question, and reasonable people could disagree with my dictionary). It prehaps reflects how the law you want behave, maybe even how it was meant to behave, but not what it actually does.
You seem to think that copyright infringment only happens if you mechanically copy something.
Drawing a picture by hand, or otherwise recreating something similar to the original is no defense.
Example: If I create a film depicting the adventures of Doc Brown and Marty McFly in their time-traveling car, I have violated some movie studio's copyright. Even though I didn't copy any specific frame of film, I'm still copying their ideas. The fact that I didn't use the trademarked title "Back To The Future" does not protect me.
If I renamed the characters, and chose a different make of car and breed of mascot dog, then maybe I could argue that by because the idea was reduced to essential stereotypes, it's not close enough to infringe.
Maybe that argument could work, but it sounds like something of a stretch. (Published comments by the Penny-Arcade author demonstrated he was firmly aiming at Mr. McGee)
So if they wanted to present that viewpoint, they'd probably have to do it in court. An expensive and dangerous proposition all around.
I did a little more searching on the "psychopath versus professional soldier" issue, and found an article claiming statistics: 4% of an army's troops are psychopaths, yet they provide 50% of it's combat power.
females were inherently better at using telephones and the like
For some statistical records on this point one might check "Race on the Line", which also covers the strong gender tendencies of those who work by telephone.
Er, no it can't. Not by any definition of "advantage" that I'm familiar with. The psycopathic axe murderer is probably more willing to spend time killing people than the average soldier or policeman, but the trained professional is going to have the advantage when the time comes to do it.
Until 1955 this was specifically untrue. Only about 15% of soldiers were capable of fighting well, and of those, nearly half had psychopathic tendencies. This is documented in works like "Men Against Fire" (of course, the actual rate of psychopathology in military veterans is one of the more impossible things to measure, but it appears that it was in fact a useful battlefield trait).
Supposedly, improved training methods (using operatant conditioning and other textbook behavioral-psych techniques) have improved overall performance enough that violent deviants should no longer be advantaged.
nothing but produce a generation overflowing with illiterate kids who can't perform basic mathematics without a calculator. If that's where there "greater importance" of communcations skills is taking us, then please stop the ride, because I'd like to get off.
It is a surprising, but valid fact that persons from low-tech civilizations are more intelligent than those from "advanced", highly populated ones. Not only is (say) a paleolithic man free from modern electronic conveniences that sap mental development, but they've got a (slight) genetic predisposition to braininess as well. (Professor Diamond has studied and published on these tendencies as observed in tribal New Guineans)
(Hurray! I managed 3 separate links to thick books, saving me from doing any painstaking typing on my own. Don't think I'm deflecting the issues by refering away to professional writers- these subjects are extensive and subtle, and cannot be fairly treated in the space of forum posts)
Fair use allows parody as long as the use does not cause confusion in the market place
You are combining unrelated aspects of Intellectual Property law. "Fair use" as a concept applies to copyright, and "confusion in the marketplace" is a concern only for trademarks.
For a particular parody to be legal to publish, it must separately pass both trademark and copyright tests.
Surviving the trademark test is easy if you don't use terms that have been registered as trademarks. Changing the name enough to be unconfusing, like "WacDanalds", will work, and there are other ways too.
To get by the copyright test, you either must not be using any copyrighted material (unlikely when paroding corporate works, but if you're targeting an individual or a governmental organization, they may not own copyrights), or you must meet the "fair use" exception. Fair use permits you to make limited violations of a copyright for the purpose of studying or critizing the material under copyright.
Since it appears that the Penny-Arcade parody critizes not "Strawberry Shortcake", but American McGee, they cannot use copyrighted "Strawberry Shortcake" images to make their point.
It is technically a parody, but it is not protected under fair use. (Whether you use the same names as the original, or twist them into funny-but-recognizable versions like "Frodo->Frito" and "Biblo->Dildo" doesn't matter)
To get the fair-use exemption to copyright law, your work must not just be a parody- it must be a parody of the material you are infringing.
In this case, Penny Arcade used some kind of "Strawberry Shortcake" copyrighted material to create a parody of American McGee's videogame development preferences (as seen here).
Since the parody doesn't make any critical commentary about "Strawberry Shortcake", it has no legal justification to use those names or images.
The famous recent case on this subject was linked to (pdf) by Penny-Arcade. In that case, a parody called "The Cat NOT in the Cat" was banned for using images from a book by Theodor Geisel to make a comment on the conduct of the Orenthal Simpsom murder trial. Because the materials he was borrowing were neither positively nor negatively commented on by his work, he was not allowed to publish the parody.
Thank you for the English lessons. However, neither the dictionary not common usage support your claim that "persistently refuse" and "did not" are synonyms
Back to the same dictionary link, then. Scroll down to the third part of the second entry.
"To decline to do"
It means "did not when asked". Satisfied?
"I persistently refuse to build the Eiffel Tower!"
That is of course nonsensical, as it is the incorrect verb tense. "I persistently refused to build it" would be entirely correct, as long as you had been requested to do so on multiple occasions.
As to the rest of that lengthy post, you are arguing with a phantom. Never in my brief comment did I state nor imply the positions you are so strenuously combatting. Nor did I take the attitude of an "embarrasing Linux zealot", which you are reflexively attacking. In fact there was nothing pro-Linux about it at all. The few gentle pokes at Microsoft don't imply Linux-evangelism, and that was a ball you started rolling with the bit about "irony". (In fact, as real irony, someone responded to that and accused you of SlashBot Microsoft-bashing)
What a bizarre argument. You're going to argue with me the effects of a "nuculear" bomb as if I don't know? What kind of troll are you? Decimation was just a choice of terms.
A definition-nazi. "Decimation" means precisely 10% destruction. Hopefully an A-Bomb will be stronger than that.
A smart Gordon Freeman would have realised the consequences of his choice.
A tough Gordon Freeman (having killed 85 USMC and 300 inter-dimensional demons) would never have been captured by a pale thin guy in a dark suit.
But, if by some miracle he was caught, a smart G-Man would never trust that Gordon wouldn't turn on him someday, once the handcuffs were off.
What I didn't like was all the jumping around in HL's last 2 or 3 levels,
At least we agree on that. Elsewhere in the giant thread you spawned, I was flamed for complaining about jumping at the end. (Amoung seemingly 200 reasons to burn me...)
I would like to see the second HL pick up where Freeman decides not to enter the portal, and manages to win the battle he has "no chance of winning"...
What will happen is Freeman works for the enemy agent throughout the sequel, until finally the tables are turned. Watching the G-Man die will be the perfect reward for complete victory.
So in your opinion, any company that does not port product X to system Y, is "persistently refusing to release a Y version of product X"...? Strange way of looking at free will and business decisions. Using that definition of "persistent refusal" (which, apparently, means the same as "did not")
It seems that English isn't your first language, so I can understand if this is hard for you. But "did not" is an excellent synonym for refuse. Maybe you're getting into a long argument based on misunderstanding a verb.
Here, I'll give you an example:
"Rui, will you please send me $80?"
Are you going to do it? If not, then you just refused. Now, if I repeat the question one thousand times over three years (as non-Windows gamers did to Valve), you will "persistently refuse". That's exactly what it means. No more, no less.
Just because I didn't give you a 10 point business-plan for how you'll profit by funding my new DVD player doesn't change the fact that you "refused".
Half-Life was released in 1997.
And in 1998, 1999... every year since then. "Platinum Edition", "Game of the Year Edition", "Plutonium Pack", "TFC Edition", "Collector's Edition", "Counterstrike Edition". "OPFOR". "Blueshift". The list goes on and on.
There was a continual stream of releases, they could (and did) add major features to any one of them.
I'm sick of this attitude of certain Linux users
Why did you decide this is about Linux? I mentioned Mac first, and Macintosh support is something Valve announced, but never followed through on. (Note the optimistic comment in there: "things should go much faster since I'll be working with id's Quake engine code which has already been ported to everything in existence." Code licensed from Id software is not the problem!). You seem to think that "refusal" is only possible after performing a business case study. Well, I doubt that press releases like that were sent out without a bean-counter crunching the numbers first.
I never thought Linux was a profitable gaming platform, although it is interesting that all of the other major FPS (Quake3, UT2003, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Medal of Honor) have released native Linux versions. Maybe those publishers think there's a market emerging- are they all wrong, but Valve was right?
(The answer to that question is unknowable, and irrelevant to the stupid argument about whether or not Valve "refused")
One question that you avoided, possibly because there's no good answer: Why does it make any sense for US soldiers to massacre US civilians, especially once they've been menaced by a real enemy and scattered away from their chain of command?
It's a great storyline. There's a reason people like the story. Because it's good.
No, it's not a "great storyline". It's an excellent implementation of a "fun premise".
The reason people claim to like the storyline is because they don't know a convenient word to use to summarize all those elements of single-player game design aside from "gameplay" and "artwork". "Premise" is too vague to serve well. The equivalent for films is "cinematography". Prehaps someday videogames will get a word for this too.
The players don't really like the story, they like the implementation. If the prelude events were told with a single page of uppercase text (as it was in Doom) they wouldn't be remembered as anything special. Instead we got a subtly gorgeous facility level that was both spacious and yet packed with lively human detail, culminating in a spectacular lightshow.
The content was not as important as the presentation.
Ah, one of those misguided fellows who thinks it had too much jumping in Xen.
If I'm misguided, then it's a very popular misconception (You sound like you've heard this opinion a lot before. Wonder why?). The design for the end of Half Life was simply a mistake. It was targeted as a mass-market game for a large, non-hardcore audience. Those legions of players were allowed to advance all the way through to the Lambda Complex by the combination of choosing the lowest difficulty level and facing fairly logical puzzles that were rooted in real-world physics or had obvious next steps.
But once the mass of players had jump-packs installed on their suits, it's game over. The "Easy" mode doesn't serve to make the instant-death jumping puzzles any more forgiving, so low-agility players who solidered through the rest of the game with methodical thinking are out of luck. They mostly just gave up, rather than enlisting a thirteen-year-old to finish for them. Of course, with the lameness of the ending, it may have been better like that.
(Very clearly, Valve knew they were already far past their deadline, and the quality of a game's ending is less of an influence on buying decisions than the beginning and middle)
Obviously I'm talking about the ending of Opposing Force in which the facilities are decimated.
If you mean a nuculear bomb went off, it would do much more than decimate a facility. It had already gone far past the point of "decimation" into "devastation" and beyond.
However OPFOR was a letdown overall. It continued with more of the same elements that made Half Life great, of course, and it finally let your sidekicks have bigger guns. But the 3d models for the new aliens, human guards, melee weapons, and facility sections were all rather poorly designed compared to the original. (Expansion architects: "We'll build teleporters- underwater!").
Their implementation of the atomic-bomb ending was especially shoddy. You, the hero, were given a perfect opportunity to both destroy the bomb and kill Suitman. A trained solider with a passing knowledge of demolitions could easily destroy either of them with just 2 kg of remotely detonated C4. It makes perfect sense, but those two targets were magically invulnerable, robbing the player of an opportunity to sway the outcome, and again damaging suspension of disbelief.
(On the other hand, OPFOR's end boss was a big step up from the hovering space-baby of the original game)
Well, for one thing, Windows 2000 wasn't targeted as a home/gamer platform. ME (briefly) and then XP were. I don't really think Microsoft would care if users can't run newer games on Win2k installs- they might even enjoy it as a way to push XP upgrade sales.
They can't change their architecture to break Wine w/o breaking apps on windows 2000,
Really? Don't they have some kind of "Microsoft-Update" internet-based system to push patches onto desktops? Couldn't this repair Windows2000 installations to track any incompatibilities a new DirectX version introduces? (Or, of course, tell the game vendors to include patches on the install CD)
Maybe you are discussing "changes" as if they had to be something fundamental to the software architecture, rather than a few new/removed API calls. That might be too big a change for Win2k to be patchable, but it's a lot of effort for questionable reward. (The WineX hackers will eventually catch up, heating off an arms race that will collaterally damage game customers in "DLL Hell")
A better approach for Microsoft could be a legal one- give game developers a new feature with a DLL they must distribute, under license terms so that no one can use it "Except in conjunction with Microsoft Windows(tm)". That's the tactic they're using to stop FoxPro applications from running on Wine (as has been reported in 2 separate Slashdot stories this week)
Yes, I know that, but not everyone does. I shouldn't have to do these steps on every new Mac. And when I go to someone else's computer, I shouldn't have to cringe at the dumb, wasteful setup.
Default settings should be good settings. Instead, by doing a lot of work, I can change a computer to be a non-standard interface that is merely poor instead of horrible. But then, I won't be able to show it to other people as an honest example of what they'll get from a Mac.
TFC, DMC and CS, for example, are not "third-party add-ons". They are financed and supported by Valve. Care to mention any "3rd party add-ons" that are supported by Microsoft? For free?
And furthermore: CS and TF were originally written by 3rd parties, were distributed for free, and became very popular before Valve purchased them. (I don't recognize "DMC"). The behavior pattern of buying-out potential competitors is very reminiscent of Microsoft.
The gameplay of CS and TF was already 20 times as popular as vanilla networked Half-Life. At around that time, Id was reducing the price of licenses to it's Quake/Quake2 source code (including free releases for Free projects). It's quite possible that the CounterStrike guys could've picked up their own source base and one additional programmer to market a standalone discount game. That would've transformed them from doing free promotional work for Half-Life, to actively reducing it's marketshare.
But, we'll never know. The situation does however resemble a successful company using it's cash reserves to pre-emptively silence a potential competitor.
To create a pile, you simply drag one file on top of another.
Yes, and that's still the same kind of object, just a different way of interacting with it. I can't claim that folders viewed in Terminal, Finder, and Internet Explorer are different objects, even though they look and act differently depending on the software I'm running.
The logical representation of the data hasn't changed- only the way the software draws it and adjusts it to mouse-movements has.
I could write an altered file-manager today which renders all my existing folders as if they were piles.
Also, a lot of the code in HL's graphics engine was licensed from Id, and Valve was limited in what they could do with it (assuming they were familiar enough with it to make a port in the first place).
All the code they got from Id worked on Mac and Linux. No need to "make a port". It was done for them by John Carmack. The fact that they ignored the existing cross-platform support of their infrastructure code was a major basis of my complaint.
The only incompatible things were stuff they changed themselves. (And those things they would be familiar enough to port)
The fact that they released a Linux server (where all the code was developed by Valve
False.
TFC, DMC and CS, for example, are not "third-party add-ons". They are financed and supported by Valve.
CS was a free 3rd party add-on for all of it's meaningful development. It had already doubled the sales life of Half-Life by the time Valve bought it, and made it a paid product. (They still had to allow free distribution of the basic netplay version, because otherwise hardcore users and server-ops would've been alienated and forked away)
The upshot is that although it wasn't a concious goal of the developers, they had a Microsoft-centric view of computing. Half-Life helped preserve the use of Microsoft Windows amoung heavy internet users and the technical elite. For most computer users, games are the only thing that Windows does incomprably better than Mac or Linux. And for many influential computer users, Half-Life was the only game they played.
Have you heard the joke at LAN parties about "Reinstalling Microsoft Half-Life Loader"? There is truth to it.
Not quite "instant". That part where you click-and-hold for an entire second kills any chance of it seeming responsive or convenient. It creates an impression that Quartz is even slower than it is. (If you get a multi-button mouse, it can be opened faster. But of course, then you've left the realm of Apple-style GUIs)
Plus, the Microsoft Start menu and (old-style) Apple menus were in the corner of the screen. According to Fitt's Law (something every GUI designer knows), things in the corner are easier to click on.
It was simple wrist-flick to zip the mouse into the corner of the screen, pull down 3cm, and *bang* you've got a calculator, or iTunes, or whatever.
But when you drag a folder into the Dock, it is positioned badly. By default, it's towards the lower-center of the screen, not a corner. The Dock stays centered, so even putting the icon on the end won't force it to a corner. And because the dock auto-rescales, the target point moves as the mouse cursor gets close to it. (Like it's trying to dodge?) Plus, the Dock shifts over as you have more programs running. That means the position of the menu will change for no reason whatsoever. Forget about training muscle-memory to access it quickly!
It really seems that a "pile" isn't truely a distinct kind of object from a "folder". It sounds more like a different approach to visualizing a folder onscreen. So to Terminal (and any other application that reads files), it can just be a folder. Possibly with an extra flag set to remind Finder how the operator prefers to view it.
The "pile" GUI concept could almost be described as "popup previews on springloaded drilldown folders". But that's both wordy and imprecise.
Some years ago, Mac-heads and UI enthusiasts were proposing that documents could conveniently be organized in "piles" or "stacks" (a term that wasn't used because it's confusing with Hypercard).
I was informed at the time that Microsoft had already published an implementation of a similar concept in the form of "Binders", collections of Microsoft Office documents of different file formats. The contents of a Binder were meant to be related as part of a project or task, but of distinct data types, and not conceptually part of a single linear document.
I understand that Microsoft's approach didn't catch on much, and it seems conceptually different from Apple's piles (no automatic re-shuffling, for example). And anyway, that product probably wasn't released until well after 1994.
It's ironic that the company that created such a perfect game (and later created and financed so many great free updates and mods) was founded by ex-Microsoft employees...
Not at all. They persistently refused to release a Linux or Mac version of the game, even though they went through years of updates and re-issues, and had a Linux server, and the Quake (and sequels) sourcebase they worked from was cross-platform. That behavior is fully consistent with Microsoft-ism.
Microsoft always supports 3rd party addons, as long as they serve as additional glue tieing users to their platform.
Slashdot Mirror
"Fair use" means much more than teachers running photocopiers.
However, if you only read the law text, you won't see fair use defined- that concept was added later by the court system. In the interpretation of judges, copyright law violated Constitutional right to free speech, so copyright cannot restrict materials from being "fairly used" for protected speech.
Parody is explicitly declared as a form of fair use in some legal decisions, like the Luther Campbell vs 2LiveCrew case.
An "idea" is almost anything that a human can think of. ("Idea" doesn't necessarily imply that it was original or creative. From a dictionary: "something that exists in the mind". A phone number I've memorized for 10 minutes? It's technically an "idea")
All "expressions of ideas" are in themselves "ideas" (a person can study an expression and bring it into her mind, causing it to meet the definition of "idea"). Some ideas are too vague to copyright, but if they're made more explicit and detailed, then they also qualify as expressed, and are protected.
The statement "Copyright protects a specific expression of an idea, and nothing more." is either false, or too vague to be meaningful (depending on how you choose to define "idea", which is a tough question, and reasonable people could disagree with my dictionary). It prehaps reflects how the law you want behave, maybe even how it was meant to behave, but not what it actually does.
No.
You seem to think that copyright infringment only happens if you mechanically copy something.
Drawing a picture by hand, or otherwise recreating something similar to the original is no defense.
Example: If I create a film depicting the adventures of Doc Brown and Marty McFly in their time-traveling car, I have violated some movie studio's copyright. Even though I didn't copy any specific frame of film, I'm still copying their ideas. The fact that I didn't use the trademarked title "Back To The Future" does not protect me.
If I renamed the characters, and chose a different make of car and breed of mascot dog, then maybe I could argue that by because the idea was reduced to essential stereotypes, it's not close enough to infringe.
Maybe that argument could work, but it sounds like something of a stretch. (Published comments by the Penny-Arcade author demonstrated he was firmly aiming at Mr. McGee)
So if they wanted to present that viewpoint, they'd probably have to do it in court. An expensive and dangerous proposition all around.
I did a little more searching on the "psychopath versus professional soldier" issue, and found an article claiming statistics: 4% of an army's troops are psychopaths, yet they provide 50% of it's combat power.
females were inherently better at using telephones and the like
For some statistical records on this point one might check "Race on the Line", which also covers the strong gender tendencies of those who work by telephone.
Er, no it can't. Not by any definition of "advantage" that I'm familiar with. The psycopathic axe murderer is probably more willing to spend time killing people than the average soldier or policeman, but the trained professional is going to have the advantage when the time comes to do it.
Until 1955 this was specifically untrue. Only about 15% of soldiers were capable of fighting well, and of those, nearly half had psychopathic tendencies. This is documented in works like "Men Against Fire" (of course, the actual rate of psychopathology in military veterans is one of the more impossible things to measure, but it appears that it was in fact a useful battlefield trait).
Supposedly, improved training methods (using operatant conditioning and other textbook behavioral-psych techniques) have improved overall performance enough that violent deviants should no longer be advantaged.
nothing but produce a generation overflowing with illiterate kids who can't perform basic mathematics without a calculator. If that's where there "greater importance" of communcations skills is taking us, then please stop the ride, because I'd like to get off.
It is a surprising, but valid fact that persons from low-tech civilizations are more intelligent than those from "advanced", highly populated ones. Not only is (say) a paleolithic man free from modern electronic conveniences that sap mental development, but they've got a (slight) genetic predisposition to braininess as well. (Professor Diamond has studied and published on these tendencies as observed in tribal New Guineans)
(Hurray! I managed 3 separate links to thick books, saving me from doing any painstaking typing on my own. Don't think I'm deflecting the issues by refering away to professional writers- these subjects are extensive and subtle, and cannot be fairly treated in the space of forum posts)
Fair use allows parody as long as the use does not cause confusion in the market place
You are combining unrelated aspects of Intellectual Property law. "Fair use" as a concept applies to copyright, and "confusion in the marketplace" is a concern only for trademarks.
For a particular parody to be legal to publish, it must separately pass both trademark and copyright tests.
Surviving the trademark test is easy if you don't use terms that have been registered as trademarks. Changing the name enough to be unconfusing, like "WacDanalds", will work, and there are other ways too.
To get by the copyright test, you either must not be using any copyrighted material (unlikely when paroding corporate works, but if you're targeting an individual or a governmental organization, they may not own copyrights), or you must meet the "fair use" exception. Fair use permits you to make limited violations of a copyright for the purpose of studying or critizing the material under copyright.
Since it appears that the Penny-Arcade parody critizes not "Strawberry Shortcake", but American McGee, they cannot use copyrighted "Strawberry Shortcake" images to make their point.
(I wrote a little more above)
It is technically a parody, but it is not protected under fair use. (Whether you use the same names as the original, or twist them into funny-but-recognizable versions like "Frodo->Frito" and "Biblo->Dildo" doesn't matter)
To get the fair-use exemption to copyright law, your work must not just be a parody- it must be a parody of the material you are infringing.
In this case, Penny Arcade used some kind of "Strawberry Shortcake" copyrighted material to create a parody of American McGee's videogame development preferences (as seen here).
Since the parody doesn't make any critical commentary about "Strawberry Shortcake", it has no legal justification to use those names or images.
The famous recent case on this subject was linked to (pdf) by Penny-Arcade. In that case, a parody called "The Cat NOT in the Cat" was banned for using images from a book by Theodor Geisel to make a comment on the conduct of the Orenthal Simpsom murder trial. Because the materials he was borrowing were neither positively nor negatively commented on by his work, he was not allowed to publish the parody.
The game never tells.
Except with your username I see...
Back to the same dictionary link, then. Scroll down to the third part of the second entry.
- "To decline to do"
It means "did not when asked". Satisfied?"I persistently refuse to build the Eiffel Tower!"
That is of course nonsensical, as it is the incorrect verb tense. "I persistently refus ed to build it" would be entirely correct, as long as you had been requested to do so on multiple occasions.
As to the rest of that lengthy post, you are arguing with a phantom. Never in my brief comment did I state nor imply the positions you are so strenuously combatting. Nor did I take the attitude of an "embarrasing Linux zealot", which you are reflexively attacking. In fact there was nothing pro-Linux about it at all. The few gentle pokes at Microsoft don't imply Linux-evangelism, and that was a ball you started rolling with the bit about "irony". (In fact, as real irony, someone responded to that and accused you of SlashBot Microsoft-bashing)
What a bizarre argument. You're going to argue with me the effects of a "nuculear" bomb as if I don't know? What kind of troll are you? Decimation was just a choice of terms.
A definition-nazi. "Decimation" means precisely 10% destruction. Hopefully an A-Bomb will be stronger than that.
A smart Gordon Freeman would have realised the consequences of his choice.
A tough Gordon Freeman (having killed 85 USMC and 300 inter-dimensional demons) would never have been captured by a pale thin guy in a dark suit.
But, if by some miracle he was caught, a smart G-Man would never trust that Gordon wouldn't turn on him someday, once the handcuffs were off.
What I didn't like was all the jumping around in HL's last 2 or 3 levels,
At least we agree on that. Elsewhere in the giant thread you spawned, I was flamed for complaining about jumping at the end. (Amoung seemingly 200 reasons to burn me...)
I would like to see the second HL pick up where Freeman decides not to enter the portal, and manages to win the battle he has "no chance of winning"...
What will happen is Freeman works for the enemy agent throughout the sequel, until finally the tables are turned. Watching the G-Man die will be the perfect reward for complete victory.
So in your opinion, any company that does not port product X to system Y, is "persistently refusing to release a Y version of product X"...? Strange way of looking at free will and business decisions. Using that definition of "persistent refusal" (which, apparently, means the same as "did not")
It seems that English isn't your first language, so I can understand if this is hard for you. But "did not" is an excellent synonym for refuse. Maybe you're getting into a long argument based on misunderstanding a verb.
Here, I'll give you an example:
"Rui, will you please send me $80?"
Are you going to do it? If not, then you just refused. Now, if I repeat the question one thousand times over three years (as non-Windows gamers did to Valve), you will "persistently refuse". That's exactly what it means. No more, no less.
Just because I didn't give you a 10 point business-plan for how you'll profit by funding my new DVD player doesn't change the fact that you "refused".
Half-Life was released in 1997.
And in 1998, 1999... every year since then. "Platinum Edition", "Game of the Year Edition", "Plutonium Pack", "TFC Edition", "Collector's Edition", "Counterstrike Edition". "OPFOR". "Blueshift". The list goes on and on.
There was a continual stream of releases, they could (and did) add major features to any one of them.
I'm sick of this attitude of certain Linux users
Why did you decide this is about Linux? I mentioned Mac first, and Macintosh support is something Valve announced, but never followed through on. (Note the optimistic comment in there: "things should go much faster since I'll be working with id's Quake engine code which has already been ported to everything in existence." Code licensed from Id software is not the problem!). You seem to think that "refusal" is only possible after performing a business case study. Well, I doubt that press releases like that were sent out without a bean-counter crunching the numbers first.
I never thought Linux was a profitable gaming platform, although it is interesting that all of the other major FPS (Quake3, UT2003, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Medal of Honor) have released native Linux versions. Maybe those publishers think there's a market emerging- are they all wrong, but Valve was right?
(The answer to that question is unknowable, and irrelevant to the stupid argument about whether or not Valve "refused")
One question that you avoided, possibly because there's no good answer: Why does it make any sense for US soldiers to massacre US civilians, especially once they've been menaced by a real enemy and scattered away from their chain of command?
It's a great storyline. There's a reason people like the story. Because it's good.
No, it's not a "great storyline". It's an excellent implementation of a "fun premise".
The reason people claim to like the storyline is because they don't know a convenient word to use to summarize all those elements of single-player game design aside from "gameplay" and "artwork". "Premise" is too vague to serve well. The equivalent for films is "cinematography". Prehaps someday videogames will get a word for this too.
The players don't really like the story, they like the implementation. If the prelude events were told with a single page of uppercase text (as it was in Doom) they wouldn't be remembered as anything special. Instead we got a subtly gorgeous facility level that was both spacious and yet packed with lively human detail, culminating in a spectacular lightshow.
The content was not as important as the presentation.
Ah, one of those misguided fellows who thinks it had too much jumping in Xen.
If I'm misguided, then it's a very popular misconception (You sound like you've heard this opinion a lot before. Wonder why?). The design for the end of Half Life was simply a mistake. It was targeted as a mass-market game for a large, non-hardcore audience. Those legions of players were allowed to advance all the way through to the Lambda Complex by the combination of choosing the lowest difficulty level and facing fairly logical puzzles that were rooted in real-world physics or had obvious next steps.
But once the mass of players had jump-packs installed on their suits, it's game over. The "Easy" mode doesn't serve to make the instant-death jumping puzzles any more forgiving, so low-agility players who solidered through the rest of the game with methodical thinking are out of luck. They mostly just gave up, rather than enlisting a thirteen-year-old to finish for them. Of course, with the lameness of the ending, it may have been better like that.
(Very clearly, Valve knew they were already far past their deadline, and the quality of a game's ending is less of an influence on buying decisions than the beginning and middle)
Obviously I'm talking about the ending of Opposing Force in which the facilities are decimated.
If you mean a nuculear bomb went off, it would do much more than decimate a facility. It had already gone far past the point of "decimation" into "devastation" and beyond.
However OPFOR was a letdown overall. It continued with more of the same elements that made Half Life great, of course, and it finally let your sidekicks have bigger guns. But the 3d models for the new aliens, human guards, melee weapons, and facility sections were all rather poorly designed compared to the original. (Expansion architects: "We'll build teleporters- underwater!").
Their implementation of the atomic-bomb ending was especially shoddy. You, the hero, were given a perfect opportunity to both destroy the bomb and kill Suitman. A trained solider with a passing knowledge of demolitions could easily destroy either of them with just 2 kg of remotely detonated C4. It makes perfect sense, but those two targets were magically invulnerable, robbing the player of an opportunity to sway the outcome, and again damaging suspension of disbelief.
(On the other hand, OPFOR's end boss was a big step up from the hovering space-baby of the original game)
Well, for one thing, Windows 2000 wasn't targeted as a home/gamer platform. ME (briefly) and then XP were. I don't really think Microsoft would care if users can't run newer games on Win2k installs- they might even enjoy it as a way to push XP upgrade sales.
They can't change their architecture to break Wine w/o breaking apps on windows 2000,
Really? Don't they have some kind of "Microsoft-Update" internet-based system to push patches onto desktops? Couldn't this repair Windows2000 installations to track any incompatibilities a new DirectX version introduces? (Or, of course, tell the game vendors to include patches on the install CD)
Maybe you are discussing "changes" as if they had to be something fundamental to the software architecture, rather than a few new/removed API calls. That might be too big a change for Win2k to be patchable, but it's a lot of effort for questionable reward. (The WineX hackers will eventually catch up, heating off an arms race that will collaterally damage game customers in "DLL Hell")
A better approach for Microsoft could be a legal one- give game developers a new feature with a DLL they must distribute, under license terms so that no one can use it "Except in conjunction with Microsoft Windows(tm)". That's the tactic they're using to stop FoxPro applications from running on Wine (as has been reported in 2 separate Slashdot stories this week)
Yes, I know that, but not everyone does. I shouldn't have to do these steps on every new Mac. And when I go to someone else's computer, I shouldn't have to cringe at the dumb, wasteful setup.
Default settings should be good settings. Instead, by doing a lot of work, I can change a computer to be a non-standard interface that is merely poor instead of horrible. But then, I won't be able to show it to other people as an honest example of what they'll get from a Mac.
I wish I could just install a replacement Dock program. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't permit that.
TFC, DMC and CS, for example, are not "third-party add-ons". They are financed and supported by Valve. Care to mention any "3rd party add-ons" that are supported by Microsoft? For free?
And furthermore: CS and TF were originally written by 3rd parties, were distributed for free, and became very popular before Valve purchased them. (I don't recognize "DMC"). The behavior pattern of buying-out potential competitors is very reminiscent of Microsoft.
The gameplay of CS and TF was already 20 times as popular as vanilla networked Half-Life. At around that time, Id was reducing the price of licenses to it's Quake/Quake2 source code (including free releases for Free projects). It's quite possible that the CounterStrike guys could've picked up their own source base and one additional programmer to market a standalone discount game. That would've transformed them from doing free promotional work for Half-Life, to actively reducing it's marketshare.
But, we'll never know. The situation does however resemble a successful company using it's cash reserves to pre-emptively silence a potential competitor.
To create a pile, you simply drag one file on top of another.
Yes, and that's still the same kind of object, just a different way of interacting with it. I can't claim that folders viewed in Terminal, Finder, and Internet Explorer are different objects, even though they look and act differently depending on the software I'm running.
The logical representation of the data hasn't changed- only the way the software draws it and adjusts it to mouse-movements has.
I could write an altered file-manager today which renders all my existing folders as if they were piles.
See?
Also, a lot of the code in HL's graphics engine was licensed from Id, and Valve was limited in what they could do with it (assuming they were familiar enough with it to make a port in the first place).
All the code they got from Id worked on Mac and Linux. No need to "make a port". It was done for them by John Carmack. The fact that they ignored the existing cross-platform support of their infrastructure code was a major basis of my complaint.
The only incompatible things were stuff they changed themselves. (And those things they would be familiar enough to port)
The fact that they released a Linux server (where all the code was developed by Valve
False.
TFC, DMC and CS, for example, are not "third-party add-ons". They are financed and supported by Valve.
CS was a free 3rd party add-on for all of it's meaningful development. It had already doubled the sales life of Half-Life by the time Valve bought it, and made it a paid product. (They still had to allow free distribution of the basic netplay version, because otherwise hardcore users and server-ops would've been alienated and forked away)
The upshot is that although it wasn't a concious goal of the developers, they had a Microsoft-centric view of computing. Half-Life helped preserve the use of Microsoft Windows amoung heavy internet users and the technical elite. For most computer users, games are the only thing that Windows does incomprably better than Mac or Linux. And for many influential computer users, Half-Life was the only game they played.
Have you heard the joke at LAN parties about "Reinstalling Microsoft Half-Life Loader"? There is truth to it.
Not quite "instant". That part where you click-and-hold for an entire second kills any chance of it seeming responsive or convenient. It creates an impression that Quartz is even slower than it is. (If you get a multi-button mouse, it can be opened faster. But of course, then you've left the realm of Apple-style GUIs)
Plus, the Microsoft Start menu and (old-style) Apple menus were in the corner of the screen. According to Fitt's Law (something every GUI designer knows), things in the corner are easier to click on.
It was simple wrist-flick to zip the mouse into the corner of the screen, pull down 3cm, and *bang* you've got a calculator, or iTunes, or whatever.
But when you drag a folder into the Dock, it is positioned badly. By default, it's towards the lower-center of the screen, not a corner. The Dock stays centered, so even putting the icon on the end won't force it to a corner. And because the dock auto-rescales, the target point moves as the mouse cursor gets close to it. (Like it's trying to dodge?) Plus, the Dock shifts over as you have more programs running. That means the position of the menu will change for no reason whatsoever. Forget about training muscle-memory to access it quickly!
The word "stack" could've been used instead of "pile". It means the same thing, except that it implies neat organization and straight edges.
However, Apple used "stack" decades ago as their Hypercard file format, and probably don't want to recycle the term.
("heap" means the same thing, but sounds even messier, and also has a firm definition in computing)
It really seems that a "pile" isn't truely a distinct kind of object from a "folder". It sounds more like a different approach to visualizing a folder onscreen. So to Terminal (and any other application that reads files), it can just be a folder. Possibly with an extra flag set to remind Finder how the operator prefers to view it.
The "pile" GUI concept could almost be described as "popup previews on springloaded drilldown folders". But that's both wordy and imprecise.
Some years ago, Mac-heads and UI enthusiasts were proposing that documents could conveniently be organized in "piles" or "stacks" (a term that wasn't used because it's confusing with Hypercard).
I was informed at the time that Microsoft had already published an implementation of a similar concept in the form of "Binders", collections of Microsoft Office documents of different file formats. The contents of a Binder were meant to be related as part of a project or task, but of distinct data types, and not conceptually part of a single linear document.
I understand that Microsoft's approach didn't catch on much, and it seems conceptually different from Apple's piles (no automatic re-shuffling, for example). And anyway, that product probably wasn't released until well after 1994.
It's ironic that the company that created such a perfect game (and later created and financed so many great free updates and mods) was founded by ex-Microsoft employees...
Not at all. They persistently refused to release a Linux or Mac version of the game, even though they went through years of updates and re-issues, and had a Linux server, and the Quake (and sequels) sourcebase they worked from was cross-platform. That behavior is fully consistent with Microsoft-ism.
Microsoft always supports 3rd party addons, as long as they serve as additional glue tieing users to their platform.