Dude, we're talking about South Africa, not some tiny, war-torn village controlled by the local dictator. You know they are a democratic country, right? You know Johannesburg is one of the richest cities in the world, and a huge tourist destination?
Yeah, the country has it's problems the farther outside of Joburg you get, but you make it sound like they're on the verge of civil war and economic collapse.
I have some friends from South Africa, some of whom have returned since Mandela's release. The country has some great things going for it, and they seem to appreciate freedom a lot more than we do in the US. I like the outlined policy on OSS, and I think the South African govt is one to really follow through on their promise to not only implement open source solutions, but to give back to the open source community through development and support.
I don't care about the price tag as much as I care about the philosophy. OSS is primarily about free as in speech, not free as in beer. Same as Red Hat Enterprise, the price tag allows them to offer you support and stability, things they don't have the financial resources to provide without charging for the service.
This is aimed at the enterprise customer who is looking for culpability in their vendors and a certain level of support. Hats off to them... I hope Linux becomes a profitable offering for the vendors pursuing it.
Because musicians (or their publishers, to be more exact) aren't in the habit of publishing song lyrics. Until an artist publishes lyrics themselves, I bought the fucking CD and I have a right to know what the hell I'm dancing to. (Since I can't understand what these kids are saying now days.)
True, but the analogy is like radio broadcasting to vinyl. I can record radio broadcasts and save them locally to listen to over and over. (I used to do that in high school, listening to my favorite Sunday night hip-hop shows all week.) But that's different than the radio station handing out prerecorded copies of each broadcast. And even that's much different than handing out prerecorded copies of each song in a broadcast.
Now I can see RIAA convincing some people that broadcasting fees will be owed, but anyway you look at it, sharing this ain't.
The Matrix was:
a) A movie with interesting philosophical underpinnings
b) Aurally and visually breath-taking
c) A philosophical treatise published for the academic community
d) Both A and B
e) The shocking biography of Cowboy Neal
I have to disagree with you. True, the image that every MMORPG addict is a pimple-faced, immature brat needs to be addressed because it's just not accurate. I have a lot of friends my age (32) and older that I play with, but I also play with the teenagers. And some of them are quite mature. You recognize the teenagers who give themselves away as little turds, but the ones you don't know are the mature players who really know how to play and enjoy the game. What's more, I have more friends (my age) that own an Xbox than own any MMORPG. If there is any difference between player base it will be based on subscription based games versus games that are only a one-time hit on the pocketbook. But with game cards available for most subscription based games, credit cards aren't a barrier any longer. As long as your allowance or job at the mall gives you $10/month, you can play EQ.
Now, whether gamers are geeks or not, I think it's tautologous. Geeks are people who, among other interests, enjoy video (PC, console, etc) games. All of us have a little geek in us. If not, want one?:)
Err... ok I misread the parent post. I read it from the perspective of someone hosting a server on the fiber network. You can do that (with their business acct), and take advantage of 100 Mbps from your server pretty easily. But you'll probably end up paying a ton of overage at the end of the month if your site turns out to be the next Onion, Homestar Runner, or Slashdot.
I work for a hosting company, and 100 Mbps isn't huge. Nice, clean code can handle up to 100 Mbps without even sweating too much. (I've seen servers running up to 75 Mbps sustained and using under 5 percent server resources on average.) Database driven sites CAN put a hurting on your procesor, depending on the complexity of your ASP/PHP/poison-of-choice, but how many people are going to host a commerce site out of their home? It's not what the service is intended for, anyway. And as someone else mentioned, the real limit is the 5GB cap they have on total throughput.
I like the desktop layout of current operating systems. I never cared for virtual desktops or any demos or screenshots I've seen of 3d operating environments. Why? Dunno. Guess I don't need any more encouragement for getting lost in my work. I already have MMORPGs for some good, long sitting sessions without the newest Matrix OS by Tron Industries Inc.
Interesting idea, and I hope companies continue to test where they can go next with machine abstraction layers, but so far I'm not sold.
In college I was known as a fish killer. (I couldn't keep the "ultimate in disposable pet technology" living for more than a week or so.) But I fixed that at the end of my freshman year by buying a shiny new Mac LCII and El-Fish, a collaboration between makers of all things Sims, Maxis Software, and Russian research group AnimaTek. It was an absolutely beautiful product, producing not that spectacular graphics, but absolutely astounding motion for a decade ago. 1 million times cooler than Microsoft's scrensaver, and loads more fun since you could catch and breed your own fish.
Watching real fish move gracefully through a tank is one of the greatest pleasures in life. You can easily zone out for an hour or so just staring at the tank. El-Fish was almost as captivating. Cheers to anyone who tries to improve on that early effort.
The BBC crew did their homework, also. Very nice article. And though they never stated, "None of the arrests are connected to the recent SQL Slammer Worm," they never once said they were. The mistake was on the part of Anonymous Coward.
There was an excellent article on this same topic in Discover recently. The possibilities are nice... leaving "personal notes" for your friends at a specific spot in the world. I think the best quote from the article was this one: "When you can stand where others have stood and learn how it affected them, and then share your own impressions in return, public space becomes more deeply public than it was before." It reminds me of a nice book on Native American religious tradition by Vine Deloria, Jr. The idea of bringing technology back to the "primitive" notion of public spaces is appealing to the hippie inside me.
Also of note in the Discover article is a brief introduction to geo-caching. Unrelated, but sounds like fun.:)
The point, as I read it, is that if browsers are following W3C standards, no one should be creating browser-specific style sheets in the first place. Take it easy, and breathe.:)
The nice thing about Helix, however, is that you can stream any damn thing you want. I will never use the Real Player until it loses the crass commercialism, forced updates, spyware modules that came along with RealOne. But the server... that's nice. An open source solution that runs on Windows, Linux or Sun (I think Sun) that will stream all of your media. The commercial implications of this are outstanding. You run a media site? You don't need to install multiple streaming servers now, and that's huge.
_______________________________________________
Bioware came out of the closet to say:
You will have to purchase a copy of the game to get a valid Neverwinter Nights CD-Key. Of course, with this purchase you also get a lovely Neverwinter Nights mapkin, a spiral-bound game manual, and three plastic-coated aluminum-reinforced W1nd0z3 brand coasters.
Did CC piss on Kling's lawn, or what? Why so bitter? I can understand the argument defending the role of publishers to some extent, but in reality too much is "filtered". If we left it up to the big, commercial publishers Einstein would never have amounted to anything. More Danielle Steele, please!
That being said, I'm still trying to figure out why defending publishers requires attacking a project like Creative Commons. Yeah, the 5 million personal sites proclaiming "Hey, my name is Dorky McDork I like Satr Wars email me if you liek movies, two! LOL)LL" do kinda suck. But the need for search and filtering tools again is no reason to trash a project like CC that is "designed to help expand the amount of intellectual work, whether owned or free, available for creative re-use." How is this a bad thing?
But I preach to the choir. I need to copy this into an email to Kling.
Because you want to take your old-fashioned dead trees to the park and read them underneath the living ones. As much of a techie addict as I am, I just can't bring myself to haul a laptop to someplace as nice as a park.
I can't speak to whether it's needed or not in an already oversaturated job market. I also can't speak to how it will compare with LARC, which another poster mentioned.
But it DOES look sweet. As for a Methodist church teaching FPS, I presume you were being a facetious. SMU is a good school, and Dallas is host to some good game developers. id started out in Dallas (Eastfield Community College in Mesquite, in fact), and Infogrames has a pretty significant house there, too. In fact, have you checked out the Guildhall site linked in the original post? SMU has adopted the font we all loved from Doom and id's early days so well. And apparently the developers are going to be teaching. I'd sign up for a class with Professor Romero!
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, we're talking about South Africa, not some tiny, war-torn village controlled by the local dictator. You know they are a democratic country, right? You know Johannesburg is one of the richest cities in the world, and a huge tourist destination?
Yeah, the country has it's problems the farther outside of Joburg you get, but you make it sound like they're on the verge of civil war and economic collapse.
I have some friends from South Africa, some of whom have returned since Mandela's release. The country has some great things going for it, and they seem to appreciate freedom a lot more than we do in the US. I like the outlined policy on OSS, and I think the South African govt is one to really follow through on their promise to not only implement open source solutions, but to give back to the open source community through development and support.
Ignore the previous ignorant ramblings. The Open Group != SCO. Well, inbred idiots, perhaps.
What, no offer from IBM, so SCO is wooing another potential buyout?
Unbelievable.
I don't care about the price tag as much as I care about the philosophy. OSS is primarily about free as in speech, not free as in beer. Same as Red Hat Enterprise, the price tag allows them to offer you support and stability, things they don't have the financial resources to provide without charging for the service.
This is aimed at the enterprise customer who is looking for culpability in their vendors and a certain level of support. Hats off to them... I hope Linux becomes a profitable offering for the vendors pursuing it.
--madgeorge
--madgeorge
Now I can see RIAA convincing some people that broadcasting fees will be owed, but anyway you look at it, sharing this ain't.
--madgeorge
The Matrix was:
a) A movie with interesting philosophical underpinnings
b) Aurally and visually breath-taking
c) A philosophical treatise published for the academic community
d) Both A and B
e) The shocking biography of Cowboy Neal
--madgeorge
Now, whether gamers are geeks or not, I think it's tautologous. Geeks are people who, among other interests, enjoy video (PC, console, etc) games. All of us have a little geek in us. If not, want one? :)
--madgeorge (little geek)
--madgeorge
No Nsync, please. Please don't ruin my memory of the greatest album ever. Yes, I'm a nerd, and I bought the CD from their site. :)
--madgeorge
--madgeorge
--madgeorge
Interesting idea, and I hope companies continue to test where they can go next with machine abstraction layers, but so far I'm not sold.
--madgeorge
Watching real fish move gracefully through a tank is one of the greatest pleasures in life. You can easily zone out for an hour or so just staring at the tank. El-Fish was almost as captivating. Cheers to anyone who tries to improve on that early effort.
--madgeorge
--madgeorge
There was an excellent article on this same topic in Discover recently. The possibilities are nice... leaving "personal notes" for your friends at a specific spot in the world. I think the best quote from the article was this one: "When you can stand where others have stood and learn how it affected them, and then share your own impressions in return, public space becomes more deeply public than it was before." It reminds me of a nice book on Native American religious tradition by Vine Deloria, Jr. The idea of bringing technology back to the "primitive" notion of public spaces is appealing to the hippie inside me.
Also of note in the Discover article is a brief introduction to geo-caching. Unrelated, but sounds like fun. :)
--madgeorge
--madgeorge
-madgeorge
But mom, I AM doing my homework!!!
--madgeorge
--madgeorge
Bioware came out of the closet to say:
You will have to purchase a copy of the game to get a valid Neverwinter Nights CD-Key. Of course, with this purchase you also get a lovely Neverwinter Nights mapkin, a spiral-bound game manual, and three plastic-coated aluminum-reinforced W1nd0z3 brand coasters.
Ok, I giggled.
Did CC piss on Kling's lawn, or what? Why so bitter? I can understand the argument defending the role of publishers to some extent, but in reality too much is "filtered". If we left it up to the big, commercial publishers Einstein would never have amounted to anything. More Danielle Steele, please!
That being said, I'm still trying to figure out why defending publishers requires attacking a project like Creative Commons. Yeah, the 5 million personal sites proclaiming "Hey, my name is Dorky McDork I like Satr Wars email me if you liek movies, two! LOL)LL" do kinda suck. But the need for search and filtering tools again is no reason to trash a project like CC that is "designed to help expand the amount of intellectual work, whether owned or free, available for creative re-use." How is this a bad thing?
But I preach to the choir. I need to copy this into an email to Kling.
--madgeorge
Because you want to take your old-fashioned dead trees to the park and read them underneath the living ones. As much of a techie addict as I am, I just can't bring myself to haul a laptop to someplace as nice as a park.
-madgeorge
I can't speak to whether it's needed or not in an already oversaturated job market. I also can't speak to how it will compare with LARC, which another poster mentioned.
But it DOES look sweet. As for a Methodist church teaching FPS, I presume you were being a facetious. SMU is a good school, and Dallas is host to some good game developers. id started out in Dallas (Eastfield Community College in Mesquite, in fact), and Infogrames has a pretty significant house there, too. In fact, have you checked out the Guildhall site linked in the original post? SMU has adopted the font we all loved from Doom and id's early days so well. And apparently the developers are going to be teaching. I'd sign up for a class with Professor Romero!