I'm not sure what you mean by Dune II was made with Virgin... It was developed by Westwood and Virgin published it (much like EA is publishing Westwood games now). Dune I, on the other hand, was developed by Cryo though also published by Virgin. It seems Virgin had the Dune license, because at the end of Dune I there's a "teaser" saying something like "Coming soon... DUNE II!" I would guess that due to poor reviews of the Cryo game, Virgin kicked the franchise over to Westwood.
Informative? Put down the pipes, moderators. The original Dune was in fact an RPG. You played Paul Atreides and walked around talking to Leto, Stilgar, etc. There weren't really any traditional puzzles to solve or battles to fight, you just met with Fremen, spoke to them, found out a little more about what was going on, then set them to work mining spice or training for war. Toward the end of the game you told all your Fremen to attack the Harkonnen palace, and that was that. It wasn't the most interesting game in the world, but it was undeniably one of the most immersive. The graphics and music were absolutely stunning at the time, and remain breathtaking even today. We're talking 320x240x256 VGA, but the color palettes were perfectly chosen, and the attention to detail when flying the ornithopter over sand and rock formations was second-to-none. I highly recommend downloading it from an abandonware site near you. If you get the CD-ROM version it has full speech throughout the whole game, with perfect pronunciation and acting on a par with a LucasArts adventure game. One of the best "art" games ever, in my opinion.
Dune 2, however, was a total different kettle of fish. That truely was the first real-time strategy where you build units, move them around, click back and forth real fast to avoid getting eaten by a sandworm, etc. There were other real-time strategies before that - the one that sticks in my mind is an old (80s era) CGA game called Sun Tzu's Art of War or something, but nothing broke through like Dune 2 did. Everyone liked Dune 2. The difficulty was very well-balanced, the interface was simple (unlike today's 25-hotkey RTS games) and the music and sound effects worked very cleverly with the game - subtlely changing with action on the screen. I think this was one of the first truly successful (read subtle) implementations of interactive music.
All in all, Dune has had a great time of it on home computers. That said, i haven't played Dune 2000 or the new C&C Dune. Anyone got reports?
Oh Battletech, The Crescent Hawk's Inception (and Revenge) were my first ever Westwood games, and in fact my first ever PC games back in 1988 on a CGA monitor and an XT i believe! The Crescent Hawk's Inception was one of the best RPGs i've played, but of course playing it now only takes a few hours to win. I'd love to see a huge, modern version of that game instead of today's run-around-and-kill-stuff-in-a-huge-robot Battletech games. Here's to more science fiction RPGs!
Don't forget Westwood also did a whole bunch of the early AD&D games (whether that's a good thing or not is perhaps debateable). They did California Games - those wacky surfer dudes with their hacky sacks:-) Kyrandia, Eye of the Beholder II, Lands of Lore (featuring our beloved Jean-Luc Picard).
I have a feeling Westwood were even around in the 8-bit days, though going under a different name, perhaps. Were they Ocean? Does anyone remember?
Well, you have to admit that most popular websites will be the same speed on broadband as they are on dial-up, especially if you already have the navigation images etc. cached.
For Slashdot i can see this. But what about CNN, eBay, MSN, Yahoo, AOL - pretty much anything that has dynamic graphical content is going to take a while on dial-up. When i'm browsing for something on eBay i don't want to wait a few minutes every time i load up the thumbnails only to find it wasn't what i wanted.
Unfortunately, as with most things in the computer world us power-users will always expand to fill the available space. Now it's so fast to download small things we must download GREAT BIG HUGE THINGS all the time.
And this is the huge culture gap that Slashdot readers seem to forget in virtually every article. The other 95% of users who have broadband are quite happy browsing the same old websites as before, only faster. It's only the small percentage of "power users" (or "leeches" or whatever) who want to find bigger and better stuff. Someone mentioned Counter Strike. It's still the most popular online game in spite of being three or four years old. Why? Because the majority of people don't have PCs that can run the latest stuff, so they're not downloading the 200MB game demos. Not to mention they're not downloading DirectX SDKs or Linux distros or any of that.
I think it's pretty lame that the 5% of self-confessed power users will bitch and moan about losing their bandwidth when their actions were causing the other 95% of people to suffer. If they didn't like the company changing the terms they should've read those terms a little closer before they signed up. I think it's perfectly fair to say if you want service above and beyond what the majority want you should expect to pay more for it.
Which, if you think about it, kind of defeats the point. Yes it's great that i'm sitting in my office right now, and when i go home i'll be able to step outside and see when the bus is coming, so i can decide whether to catch up on some groceries... But what about when i leave home and i step outside to catch the bus into work? It would be nice to know if i had to call in saying the bus was late. Or what about where i'm working right now, if my office was a few blocks up suddenly i wouldn't get the luxury of a digital/GPS timetable any more? Huh? You would've thought the least they would've done is just put it along every stop for one or two routes instead of one or two stops on every route. And with the rate increase last year, seriously, how can they NOT afford to put in say 1000 cheap LED displays with aerials on the top?
I am astounded hearing so many people saying broadband == mass leeching. What? To me the whole point of broadband is speed. It's an upgrade from a 56k to a faster connection, same as when you called the 28k8 BBS line instead of the 14k4 BBS line. It's just nice to have pages appear as soon as you click on them instead of 30 seconds later. It's nice to log in to a shell account and see the letters echoed back immediately instead waiting. It's nice to have your CVS update or Windows Update run in a minute or two instead of twenty minutes.
The whole point of broadband is that it's faster to get the same things. If you're using it to get BIGGER things, then you haven't really graduated from a 56k, have you? Think about it: when you used to download a 56k RealAudio stream it would skip every now and then - now you download a 256k MP3 stream and it still skips every now and then. Or how about this: when you used to download a 50MB game demo it took 2 hours - now you download a 200MB game demo and it still takes 2 hours. Where is the added value? The added value is in the small things that you continue to download that now download faster.
Absolutely damn straight. I'm reading through the comments here from people who are proud of their multi-gigabyte-per-day downloads and i'm just amazed. I consider myself a pretty hardcore geek, in the sense as soon as i get home from work I am online till i go to bed, but that's what, 6 hours? I chat, i browse, i download new software and upgrades, i game online, i listen to NPR... And there is no way i could ever get near a gig in those 6 hours.
I'm really curious as to what these people are doing that requires that kind of bandwidth. Streaming radio? That wouldn't even get close. Six hours of streaming video? Are there even sites that broadcast 24/7 like that? Legally? Downloading multimedia? How many gigs of legal MP3s and legal movies are there online in total? I seriously doubt enough to warrant downloading them 24/7/365.
But at the end of the day it's not even what you're downloading - it's the fact you're doing it at all. Game demos, Linux ISOs, legal, illegal, whatever, do you people have no lives? Do you really leave your computer on, downloading all day and then as soon as you're home from work manically watch all the movies in fast-forward with subtitles and listen to the first minute or two of all the MP3s and install all the Linux distributions with "quick install" option in those six hours? I don't honestly believe that so many people's lives amount to that. It just doesn't make sense. And if it's true then we're living in a sad, sad world:-(
Totally. UNIX was designed from the very beginning to be a multi-user server operating system, back when clients only had very simple terminal connections. X is a hack, as is "UNIX on the desktop". I do it too - i love UNIX, i use it every day at work, i have 5 terminal windows open always, i code pure UNIX C, i use Cygwin at home because i can't stand fancy schmancy IDEs... but at the end of the day when i just want to browse Slashdot or write up some documentation it's Windows (or Apple, i guess) all the way, baby. I know some people can manage with X, but Windows is just schweet for simple, straightforward, single-user desktop apps. No muss, no fuss. For me UNIX is about excellent server administration and excellent development environments. *shrug* I know i'm in the minority in the Slashdot community and will get modded down for saying it. Whatever.
Of course on Linux you don't have the luxury:-/ But hell, if you code it right and make sure you comment next to every strcat and strcmp exactly why you expect no buffer overflows to happen it's all good. For speed there's just no substitute (except assembly of course).
Mmmmm Dennis Ritchie interview as h'ourdeurves, Victoria Bitter as a main dish and Jim Beam and Coke for dessert. Who could ask for more? Exschuse me while i crack open another... IT'S FRIDAY NIGHT IN AUSTRALIA, PEOPLE! heeehee
The GPL is popular with companies for one reason - they can release the source and feel comfortable noone is going to steal it and improve it without that company being able to get those improvements back. It is not popular in the sense that the company can use GPLed software in its own software. In fact, that's a constant problem. There have been a number of times we've wanted to incorporate some open source into our projects, but there's just no way, because as a small company we can't afford to have a big company come along, recompile and say "COMPATIBLE WITH <project>!!!" and take our customers.
I think a lot of young developers have a habit of slapping a GPL on their software without really thinking about the consequences. I think a lot of young people who write open source are aiming for a public domain or BSD license, but don't know enough about the way things work to actually put the right license on it. In this sense, RMS has done an amazing marketing job - getting the word out about GNU and the GPL and "free" software. Kudos to him, but it does make things harder in the business world.
Oh, and please don't reply saying "you're just trying to steal all of our work". No. The point is not duplicating simple things that would save everyone time. This has been fairly common practice in successful hardware designs for years - you publish the specs openly and release a "reference" board, but make money from your own enhancements. Software could have gotten a lot further a lot faster if there had been an "reference" UNIX spec and a "reference" DOS spec back in 1982. It's a shame noone stuck to the OSF standards for open UNIX development... but on the other hand - look at how well the PC market is supported nowadays, versus the closed Apple market. This is directly due to IBM and Intel "opening" their design specs.
Me too. I used IRC for years, and DCC was always the number one shittiest thing on it. It takes ten times as long as it would to transfer the same file over HTTP. Even FTP for crying out loud. Most of my... umm... larger downloads came from usenet (w00t for uuencoding), then the web, and more recently friends' FTP sites. I just don't understand how DCC got so popular amongst the warez/mp3 crowd.
Speaking of TenDRA, do you have any plans to try to build the whole BSD kernel and base userland with it? I would very, very much like to see a BSD release that didn't rely on the GPL build tools.
Ok, so what about the young person who thought that 'Rearranged' was an awesome, fresh, ass kicking song; one that will stand the test of time just like 'Photograph' by 'Def Leppard'. But, conversely, they thought that 'Rollin' was a pile of horse shit, just like the dirty-old-lecher-anthem stinkbomb 'Pour Some Sugar on Me' by 'Def Leppard?'
But isn't it interesting that everyone remembers "Pour Some Sugar On Me" and not "Photograph"? Isn't it interesting everyone remembers "Rollin'" and not "Rearranged"? It's the popular songs that stand the test of time, as far as memories go, not necessarily the obscure ones. You could go up to someone who had no idea who Limp Bizkit were and say "hey they do that Rollin' song like in the WWE and all these movie previews" and they'd be like "hey yeah, i know that", and maybe they'd go out and buy it. That's how pop music works. It's catchy, everyone knows it, it's popular. It doesn't matter if it's a crap song, that's not the point - the point is that it's popular. Maybe that means the average Joe has bad taste in music, maybe that means the average Joe can't think for himself, whatever, but that's a problem with the average Joe, not the record companies. You can't blame them for exploiting a large market - that's what owning a successful business is all about.
Yes, you are elitist. I like plenty of bizarre, underground songs, and have been involved in local scenes where the total fanbase for a band is well under 500, where CDs run in limited editions of 50, not even a few hundred. But unlike you, i understand and accept that the majority of people prefer pop music and are quite happy with it. I understand that no matter how many obscure CDs i play for them, they'll always prefer pop music. I don't mind it. Sometimes i bring them something a little unusual that they dig, sometimes they show me a pop band who rock my socks. It's just music for crying out loud.
And why is the law not being changed? Because the majority of people (or more specifically, the representatives they chose to elect) don't care. You're perfectly within your rights to think the current implementation of the copyright law is stupid, but that doesn't make it right to break it - no more right than it is to break any other law. If a person wants to break the law that's his business, and i would hope he would be suitably prosecuted, but my main issue with people on Slashdot in particular is how they disclaim responsibility for the crime. I'd like to see these people admitting that not only are they breaking the law, but that they are also deliberately ignoring the wishes of the rightful copyright holder.
But it's not music. It won't reach anyone. It doesn't seek anything. It asks no questions and provides no answers. It has no heart. It says nothing. People can sense this on a subconscious and emotional level. There's NOTHING THERE.
I guess that's why Britney's albums only sell a few copies and the original poster's jazz hero is top of the album and single charts regularly. Oh, wait a second. You were just talking crap. It seems you've completely missed the point of pop music.
Most people do not care about how technically skilled a musician is, they don't care if he can play a Cmin7 scale in 96th notes standing on his head, they don't care whether the song "means" something or not. What most people DO care about is if a tune has a good hook, if a video is eye-catching, if they can dance to it, if they can sing along to it etc. That is why the people who can write tunes with good hooks are popular and the people who write relatively inaccessible stuff remain fringe artists. Yes, Billy Joel played piano and had a story to tell, but what made his songs popular was the fact that they were catchy songs. Keith Emerson is far less popular, because when he sits down and fires off "Karn Evil #9" most people end up sitting there going "what in God's name was that?" I'll tell you what: virtuoso playing with a strong lyrical and musical message, but quite inaccessible to the average Joe. Pop musicians write (or play, or perform, or lip-synch to) the music that people want to hear. That's why they're pop musicians and that's the whole definition of pop music.
Can Britney Spears pick up an instrument and actually *play* something? Can she sight-read? Can she improvise? Does she know the difference between a minor and diminshed chord? Can she even harmonize a melody? Can any of the current "pop stars" do any of these things? Can they do them WELL ENOUGH TO SELL ALBUMS?
Could Elvis do much more than just plink a few simple chords on his guitar? Do countless millions of fans care? No. Pop music is about the whole package, not about musical skill. And if someone prefers pop music to "virtuoso music" that doesn't make them any less of a person. I personally love listening to Britney, not because of the lyrics or the vocals, but the production is some of the sweetest you'll ever hear. Listen to "Oops I Did It Again" on a good sound system, hear how the bass synths cut through the mix so sharply, but at the same time don't take away from the melodies on top. Listen to those curling effects on her voice as she goes "yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah". Listen to the way the songwriter put the song together so even if you hate the song you'll still remember the hooks, the tunes, even a year later. Look at the video clip and the way they've choreographed her dancing, look at her make-up and clothes. Look at the way she is pushed in the media. These are the things that make a pop musician popular, and they are just as valid talents as being a skilled "traditional" musician. Just because you don't appreciate those talents doesn't mean it's not still something to be blown away by. Think about ALL the work that goes into making a Britney album, not just the time spent writing the melodies.
I swear you people have some seriously screwed up reasoning. I can't even comprehend how you can make a jump from "it was easy to make a copy of" to "therefore it's perfectly okay for me to copy it". No, no it's not. When you buy a CD, you don't own the music - you own the CD. You don't buy rights to redistribute the music, you buy the right to listen to the music and to resell/give away the CD. That's all. You have no right to make a copy and send it to someone else. It's not stealing because the distibutor might lose a CD sale, it's stealing because you are taking away the right the distributor had to unique distribution. The crime is you infringing on a company's legal rights, not you stealing $15 from the company's coffers.
This isn't funny, nor a troll (though it was probably intended to be). It's the truth. There is nothing wrong with distributing music that the copyright owner okays. There is something very, very wrong with distributing music that the copyright owner does not okay. I honestly can't understand how ordinarily sane people can be so criminally selfish when it comes to this. No you don't have a right to do copy and distribute music illegally. No you don't have a moral justification either, if you're doing it against the copyright owner's wishes. Maybe the majors ARE screwing you, but tough shit. Buy independent music instead. Download legal MP3s. You have NO RIGHT to do this - nowhere in the constitution does it say that every American has the right to own a copy of every piece of music ever recorded.
Ah yes, and in the 90s noone listened to disco remixes. In the 80s noone listened to Dee-Lite or the B-52s. "Retro" has always been hip. Young people who need to be "cooler" than the average young person have always listened to retro music. Young people who are quite happy being "just plain cool" will listen to Limp Bizkit and love it, and in five years they'll be complaining no music has come out in the last five years that was any good - that Limp Bizkit was The End Of Metal. Bullcrap. It's common knowledge that around the age of 19-20, most people's tastes get locked in time. Either they only buy old music, or they only buy "retro" music. Just admit it - you're getting old. It happens to almost everyone, you get to a point when current pop music doesn't excite you any more. To me, this is a wonderful nod in the direction of musicians and particularly A&R people, who are able to stay with the trends and keep giving the teenagers what they want.
I know this comment is coming in very late and noone's likely to read it, but it's being done for the Amstrad CPC (close-ish to the Spectrum). Information here. Everyone knows the CPC was the REAL 8-bit demo machine:-) The freaks are still making CPC demos in Europe:-) Having lost my CPC years ago, i'd love one of these. Sure, you could emulate it, sure you could probably just put it on a PCI card, but it's cool.
Funny, yes, but at the same time... There is perfectly good reason to upgrade. New Technology Is Better(tm). Anyone who lived through vinyl or tapes, barring a few stubborn die-hards, will tell you moving to CD was an amazing transition. Fast track skipping and repeat, no clicks, no cracks, no "blurred" sound, etc. Ditto with going from videos to DVD - fast "fast-forward", no snow, no jammed tape, no "blurred" picture, etc. But when the next innovation in video or audio technology comes along we'll all step up sooner or later and realize how limiting CDs and DVDs really were.
I've owned well over 300 CDs since 94, and i'm sure there are many Slashdotters who've owned some for longer. I have a total of one that has rotted - a Led Zep album that i bought second-hand on usenet and was already rotting when i bought it. Granted i wasn't too impressed with that purchase. That said, on any decent CD player it still plays just fine. I don't really see the big problem here. It sounds like FUD to me - i would guess that a lot of these "rotting" CDs or DVDs come from people who don't take care to keep their houses at sensible temperatures and humidity levels, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what you mean by Dune II was made with Virgin... It was developed by Westwood and Virgin published it (much like EA is publishing Westwood games now). Dune I, on the other hand, was developed by Cryo though also published by Virgin. It seems Virgin had the Dune license, because at the end of Dune I there's a "teaser" saying something like "Coming soon... DUNE II!" I would guess that due to poor reviews of the Cryo game, Virgin kicked the franchise over to Westwood.
Informative? Put down the pipes, moderators. The original Dune was in fact an RPG. You played Paul Atreides and walked around talking to Leto, Stilgar, etc. There weren't really any traditional puzzles to solve or battles to fight, you just met with Fremen, spoke to them, found out a little more about what was going on, then set them to work mining spice or training for war. Toward the end of the game you told all your Fremen to attack the Harkonnen palace, and that was that. It wasn't the most interesting game in the world, but it was undeniably one of the most immersive. The graphics and music were absolutely stunning at the time, and remain breathtaking even today. We're talking 320x240x256 VGA, but the color palettes were perfectly chosen, and the attention to detail when flying the ornithopter over sand and rock formations was second-to-none. I highly recommend downloading it from an abandonware site near you. If you get the CD-ROM version it has full speech throughout the whole game, with perfect pronunciation and acting on a par with a LucasArts adventure game. One of the best "art" games ever, in my opinion.
Dune 2, however, was a total different kettle of fish. That truely was the first real-time strategy where you build units, move them around, click back and forth real fast to avoid getting eaten by a sandworm, etc. There were other real-time strategies before that - the one that sticks in my mind is an old (80s era) CGA game called Sun Tzu's Art of War or something, but nothing broke through like Dune 2 did. Everyone liked Dune 2. The difficulty was very well-balanced, the interface was simple (unlike today's 25-hotkey RTS games) and the music and sound effects worked very cleverly with the game - subtlely changing with action on the screen. I think this was one of the first truly successful (read subtle) implementations of interactive music.
All in all, Dune has had a great time of it on home computers. That said, i haven't played Dune 2000 or the new C&C Dune. Anyone got reports?
Oh Battletech, The Crescent Hawk's Inception (and Revenge) were my first ever Westwood games, and in fact my first ever PC games back in 1988 on a CGA monitor and an XT i believe! The Crescent Hawk's Inception was one of the best RPGs i've played, but of course playing it now only takes a few hours to win. I'd love to see a huge, modern version of that game instead of today's run-around-and-kill-stuff-in-a-huge-robot Battletech games. Here's to more science fiction RPGs!
Don't forget Westwood also did a whole bunch of the early AD&D games (whether that's a good thing or not is perhaps debateable). They did California Games - those wacky surfer dudes with their hacky sacks :-) Kyrandia, Eye of the Beholder II, Lands of Lore (featuring our beloved Jean-Luc Picard).
I have a feeling Westwood were even around in the 8-bit days, though going under a different name, perhaps. Were they Ocean? Does anyone remember?
Anyone else gone out in the middle of the night and driven back and forth over one of those counters?
For Slashdot i can see this. But what about CNN, eBay, MSN, Yahoo, AOL - pretty much anything that has dynamic graphical content is going to take a while on dial-up. When i'm browsing for something on eBay i don't want to wait a few minutes every time i load up the thumbnails only to find it wasn't what i wanted.
And this is the huge culture gap that Slashdot readers seem to forget in virtually every article. The other 95% of users who have broadband are quite happy browsing the same old websites as before, only faster. It's only the small percentage of "power users" (or "leeches" or whatever) who want to find bigger and better stuff. Someone mentioned Counter Strike. It's still the most popular online game in spite of being three or four years old. Why? Because the majority of people don't have PCs that can run the latest stuff, so they're not downloading the 200MB game demos. Not to mention they're not downloading DirectX SDKs or Linux distros or any of that.
I think it's pretty lame that the 5% of self-confessed power users will bitch and moan about losing their bandwidth when their actions were causing the other 95% of people to suffer. If they didn't like the company changing the terms they should've read those terms a little closer before they signed up. I think it's perfectly fair to say if you want service above and beyond what the majority want you should expect to pay more for it.
Which, if you think about it, kind of defeats the point. Yes it's great that i'm sitting in my office right now, and when i go home i'll be able to step outside and see when the bus is coming, so i can decide whether to catch up on some groceries... But what about when i leave home and i step outside to catch the bus into work? It would be nice to know if i had to call in saying the bus was late. Or what about where i'm working right now, if my office was a few blocks up suddenly i wouldn't get the luxury of a digital/GPS timetable any more? Huh? You would've thought the least they would've done is just put it along every stop for one or two routes instead of one or two stops on every route. And with the rate increase last year, seriously, how can they NOT afford to put in say 1000 cheap LED displays with aerials on the top?
I am astounded hearing so many people saying broadband == mass leeching. What? To me the whole point of broadband is speed. It's an upgrade from a 56k to a faster connection, same as when you called the 28k8 BBS line instead of the 14k4 BBS line. It's just nice to have pages appear as soon as you click on them instead of 30 seconds later. It's nice to log in to a shell account and see the letters echoed back immediately instead waiting. It's nice to have your CVS update or Windows Update run in a minute or two instead of twenty minutes.
The whole point of broadband is that it's faster to get the same things. If you're using it to get BIGGER things, then you haven't really graduated from a 56k, have you? Think about it: when you used to download a 56k RealAudio stream it would skip every now and then - now you download a 256k MP3 stream and it still skips every now and then. Or how about this: when you used to download a 50MB game demo it took 2 hours - now you download a 200MB game demo and it still takes 2 hours. Where is the added value? The added value is in the small things that you continue to download that now download faster.
Absolutely damn straight. I'm reading through the comments here from people who are proud of their multi-gigabyte-per-day downloads and i'm just amazed. I consider myself a pretty hardcore geek, in the sense as soon as i get home from work I am online till i go to bed, but that's what, 6 hours? I chat, i browse, i download new software and upgrades, i game online, i listen to NPR... And there is no way i could ever get near a gig in those 6 hours.
I'm really curious as to what these people are doing that requires that kind of bandwidth. Streaming radio? That wouldn't even get close. Six hours of streaming video? Are there even sites that broadcast 24/7 like that? Legally? Downloading multimedia? How many gigs of legal MP3s and legal movies are there online in total? I seriously doubt enough to warrant downloading them 24/7/365.
But at the end of the day it's not even what you're downloading - it's the fact you're doing it at all. Game demos, Linux ISOs, legal, illegal, whatever, do you people have no lives? Do you really leave your computer on, downloading all day and then as soon as you're home from work manically watch all the movies in fast-forward with subtitles and listen to the first minute or two of all the MP3s and install all the Linux distributions with "quick install" option in those six hours? I don't honestly believe that so many people's lives amount to that. It just doesn't make sense. And if it's true then we're living in a sad, sad world :-(
Totally. UNIX was designed from the very beginning to be a multi-user server operating system, back when clients only had very simple terminal connections. X is a hack, as is "UNIX on the desktop". I do it too - i love UNIX, i use it every day at work, i have 5 terminal windows open always, i code pure UNIX C, i use Cygwin at home because i can't stand fancy schmancy IDEs... but at the end of the day when i just want to browse Slashdot or write up some documentation it's Windows (or Apple, i guess) all the way, baby. I know some people can manage with X, but Windows is just schweet for simple, straightforward, single-user desktop apps. No muss, no fuss. For me UNIX is about excellent server administration and excellent development environments. *shrug* I know i'm in the minority in the Slashdot community and will get modded down for saying it. Whatever.
Of course on Linux you don't have the luxury :-/ But hell, if you code it right and make sure you comment next to every strcat and strcmp exactly why you expect no buffer overflows to happen it's all good. For speed there's just no substitute (except assembly of course).
Mmmmm Dennis Ritchie interview as h'ourdeurves, Victoria Bitter as a main dish and Jim Beam and Coke for dessert. Who could ask for more? Exschuse me while i crack open another... IT'S FRIDAY NIGHT IN AUSTRALIA, PEOPLE! heeehee
The GPL is popular with companies for one reason - they can release the source and feel comfortable noone is going to steal it and improve it without that company being able to get those improvements back. It is not popular in the sense that the company can use GPLed software in its own software. In fact, that's a constant problem. There have been a number of times we've wanted to incorporate some open source into our projects, but there's just no way, because as a small company we can't afford to have a big company come along, recompile and say "COMPATIBLE WITH <project>!!!" and take our customers.
I think a lot of young developers have a habit of slapping a GPL on their software without really thinking about the consequences. I think a lot of young people who write open source are aiming for a public domain or BSD license, but don't know enough about the way things work to actually put the right license on it. In this sense, RMS has done an amazing marketing job - getting the word out about GNU and the GPL and "free" software. Kudos to him, but it does make things harder in the business world.
Oh, and please don't reply saying "you're just trying to steal all of our work". No. The point is not duplicating simple things that would save everyone time. This has been fairly common practice in successful hardware designs for years - you publish the specs openly and release a "reference" board, but make money from your own enhancements. Software could have gotten a lot further a lot faster if there had been an "reference" UNIX spec and a "reference" DOS spec back in 1982. It's a shame noone stuck to the OSF standards for open UNIX development... but on the other hand - look at how well the PC market is supported nowadays, versus the closed Apple market. This is directly due to IBM and Intel "opening" their design specs.
Me too. I used IRC for years, and DCC was always the number one shittiest thing on it. It takes ten times as long as it would to transfer the same file over HTTP. Even FTP for crying out loud. Most of my... umm... larger downloads came from usenet (w00t for uuencoding), then the web, and more recently friends' FTP sites. I just don't understand how DCC got so popular amongst the warez/mp3 crowd.
Speaking of TenDRA, do you have any plans to try to build the whole BSD kernel and base userland with it? I would very, very much like to see a BSD release that didn't rely on the GPL build tools.
But isn't it interesting that everyone remembers "Pour Some Sugar On Me" and not "Photograph"? Isn't it interesting everyone remembers "Rollin'" and not "Rearranged"? It's the popular songs that stand the test of time, as far as memories go, not necessarily the obscure ones. You could go up to someone who had no idea who Limp Bizkit were and say "hey they do that Rollin' song like in the WWE and all these movie previews" and they'd be like "hey yeah, i know that", and maybe they'd go out and buy it. That's how pop music works. It's catchy, everyone knows it, it's popular. It doesn't matter if it's a crap song, that's not the point - the point is that it's popular. Maybe that means the average Joe has bad taste in music, maybe that means the average Joe can't think for himself, whatever, but that's a problem with the average Joe, not the record companies. You can't blame them for exploiting a large market - that's what owning a successful business is all about.
Yes, you are elitist. I like plenty of bizarre, underground songs, and have been involved in local scenes where the total fanbase for a band is well under 500, where CDs run in limited editions of 50, not even a few hundred. But unlike you, i understand and accept that the majority of people prefer pop music and are quite happy with it. I understand that no matter how many obscure CDs i play for them, they'll always prefer pop music. I don't mind it. Sometimes i bring them something a little unusual that they dig, sometimes they show me a pop band who rock my socks. It's just music for crying out loud.
And why is the law not being changed? Because the majority of people (or more specifically, the representatives they chose to elect) don't care. You're perfectly within your rights to think the current implementation of the copyright law is stupid, but that doesn't make it right to break it - no more right than it is to break any other law. If a person wants to break the law that's his business, and i would hope he would be suitably prosecuted, but my main issue with people on Slashdot in particular is how they disclaim responsibility for the crime. I'd like to see these people admitting that not only are they breaking the law, but that they are also deliberately ignoring the wishes of the rightful copyright holder.
I guess that's why Britney's albums only sell a few copies and the original poster's jazz hero is top of the album and single charts regularly. Oh, wait a second. You were just talking crap. It seems you've completely missed the point of pop music.
Most people do not care about how technically skilled a musician is, they don't care if he can play a Cmin7 scale in 96th notes standing on his head, they don't care whether the song "means" something or not. What most people DO care about is if a tune has a good hook, if a video is eye-catching, if they can dance to it, if they can sing along to it etc. That is why the people who can write tunes with good hooks are popular and the people who write relatively inaccessible stuff remain fringe artists. Yes, Billy Joel played piano and had a story to tell, but what made his songs popular was the fact that they were catchy songs. Keith Emerson is far less popular, because when he sits down and fires off "Karn Evil #9" most people end up sitting there going "what in God's name was that?" I'll tell you what: virtuoso playing with a strong lyrical and musical message, but quite inaccessible to the average Joe. Pop musicians write (or play, or perform, or lip-synch to) the music that people want to hear. That's why they're pop musicians and that's the whole definition of pop music.
Could Elvis do much more than just plink a few simple chords on his guitar? Do countless millions of fans care? No. Pop music is about the whole package, not about musical skill. And if someone prefers pop music to "virtuoso music" that doesn't make them any less of a person. I personally love listening to Britney, not because of the lyrics or the vocals, but the production is some of the sweetest you'll ever hear. Listen to "Oops I Did It Again" on a good sound system, hear how the bass synths cut through the mix so sharply, but at the same time don't take away from the melodies on top. Listen to those curling effects on her voice as she goes "yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah". Listen to the way the songwriter put the song together so even if you hate the song you'll still remember the hooks, the tunes, even a year later. Look at the video clip and the way they've choreographed her dancing, look at her make-up and clothes. Look at the way she is pushed in the media. These are the things that make a pop musician popular, and they are just as valid talents as being a skilled "traditional" musician. Just because you don't appreciate those talents doesn't mean it's not still something to be blown away by. Think about ALL the work that goes into making a Britney album, not just the time spent writing the melodies.
I swear you people have some seriously screwed up reasoning. I can't even comprehend how you can make a jump from "it was easy to make a copy of" to "therefore it's perfectly okay for me to copy it". No, no it's not. When you buy a CD, you don't own the music - you own the CD. You don't buy rights to redistribute the music, you buy the right to listen to the music and to resell/give away the CD. That's all. You have no right to make a copy and send it to someone else. It's not stealing because the distibutor might lose a CD sale, it's stealing because you are taking away the right the distributor had to unique distribution. The crime is you infringing on a company's legal rights, not you stealing $15 from the company's coffers.
This isn't funny, nor a troll (though it was probably intended to be). It's the truth. There is nothing wrong with distributing music that the copyright owner okays. There is something very, very wrong with distributing music that the copyright owner does not okay. I honestly can't understand how ordinarily sane people can be so criminally selfish when it comes to this. No you don't have a right to do copy and distribute music illegally. No you don't have a moral justification either, if you're doing it against the copyright owner's wishes. Maybe the majors ARE screwing you, but tough shit. Buy independent music instead. Download legal MP3s. You have NO RIGHT to do this - nowhere in the constitution does it say that every American has the right to own a copy of every piece of music ever recorded.
Ah yes, and in the 90s noone listened to disco remixes. In the 80s noone listened to Dee-Lite or the B-52s. "Retro" has always been hip. Young people who need to be "cooler" than the average young person have always listened to retro music. Young people who are quite happy being "just plain cool" will listen to Limp Bizkit and love it, and in five years they'll be complaining no music has come out in the last five years that was any good - that Limp Bizkit was The End Of Metal. Bullcrap. It's common knowledge that around the age of 19-20, most people's tastes get locked in time. Either they only buy old music, or they only buy "retro" music. Just admit it - you're getting old. It happens to almost everyone, you get to a point when current pop music doesn't excite you any more. To me, this is a wonderful nod in the direction of musicians and particularly A&R people, who are able to stay with the trends and keep giving the teenagers what they want.
Aaand i just found this site which is creating a pseudo Spectrum :-) Not full emulation, but the same basic idea. Sounds interesting.
I know this comment is coming in very late and noone's likely to read it, but it's being done for the Amstrad CPC (close-ish to the Spectrum). Information here. Everyone knows the CPC was the REAL 8-bit demo machine :-) The freaks are still making CPC demos in Europe :-) Having lost my CPC years ago, i'd love one of these. Sure, you could emulate it, sure you could probably just put it on a PCI card, but it's cool.
Funny, yes, but at the same time... There is perfectly good reason to upgrade. New Technology Is Better(tm). Anyone who lived through vinyl or tapes, barring a few stubborn die-hards, will tell you moving to CD was an amazing transition. Fast track skipping and repeat, no clicks, no cracks, no "blurred" sound, etc. Ditto with going from videos to DVD - fast "fast-forward", no snow, no jammed tape, no "blurred" picture, etc. But when the next innovation in video or audio technology comes along we'll all step up sooner or later and realize how limiting CDs and DVDs really were.
I've owned well over 300 CDs since 94, and i'm sure there are many Slashdotters who've owned some for longer. I have a total of one that has rotted - a Led Zep album that i bought second-hand on usenet and was already rotting when i bought it. Granted i wasn't too impressed with that purchase. That said, on any decent CD player it still plays just fine. I don't really see the big problem here. It sounds like FUD to me - i would guess that a lot of these "rotting" CDs or DVDs come from people who don't take care to keep their houses at sensible temperatures and humidity levels, etc.