My understanding from studying articles on several game copyright and trademark lawsuits is that you can copy the idea of a game as long as you call it something different and produce everything yourself. Copying bitmaps and such from the original is definitely not allowed.
In that sense we'll always have the classics, legally.
Although some game companies, such as Hasbro, have been known to bully clone makers, by taking them to court, losing, and appealing over and over until the defendant is bankrupt.
In one bullying campaign, shareware and freeware sites were spidered for names containing "tris" and threatening emails were sent to webmasters telling them to remove the software or be sued, despite having lost every court case against every author they sued.
I've forgotten what I was replying to. I hope this isn't off topic.
As someone pointed out earlier, SCO is STILL distributing the disputed kernel with source. By continuing to distribute it mixed with their own GPL-incompliant source code, they are violating the intellectual property rights of everyone who ever contributed to the linux kernel. Without agreeing to the GPL they have no right to distrubute GPL'd software, because nothing else but the GPL gives them that right.
Customers still have to install the patch. Too often they don't. The company has to weigh the effect of that on their business versus the twisted satisfaction they get from taking legal action against someone who helped them debug their software.
He does have a means to protect himself, the secrecy of the exploit.
* If they release a patch, the exploit remains a complete secret, he gets a pat on the back, and everyone is happy.
* If they refuse to release a patch, he can tarnish their reputation by posting of its existence, but without sharing the details of how to exploit it. Demonstrations available upon request to trustworthy security experts.
* If they threaten legal action, he can threaten the release of the exploit.
* If they pursue legal action, full details of the exploit plus the proof of concept appear on hundreds of websites, possibly including Slashdot.
It's a good thing I didn't make a donation at http://www.freemikehawash.org/ when this first came out.
But guilty or not, it didn't seem right for him to be held in prison for several months without being charged, calling him a "material witness". One could say they forced his confession, because they admittedly weren't going to let him out until they heard what they wanted.
Send out an anonymous chain letter to a bunch of random programmers. Say they must send it to 7 other programmers or be eaten by the Taco Bell chihuahua.
Though I was startled to find that there's a transsexual model out there who appeared in a James Bond film and is married to someone who has the same name as I do. I hope that if I ever become famous nobody will look back on that article and draw the wrong conclusions.
Re:the 'let's go kill people' software
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 1
About 4 years ago I decided to stop guessing when Duke Nukem Forever come out. Today I'm glad I didn't let myself waste away with all the other gamers who are waiting for it.
It'll probably be good when it comes out though. But it's entirely possible that some janitor sprayed window cleaner on all the servers, workstations, and tape backups and they've been scrambling to rewrite it ever since.
Just for fun, I thought I would run their privacy policy through babelfish. It didn't work, but I did get a nice sampling of semi-random words.
Here's an excerpt: the Shanghai little girl shakes chokes the stamp counter 3. Tau infants spear piecE prize gallbladder snow sister-in-law Yao luxurious knee Wei A tau 4. last of the ten Heavenly Stems Tau infants the spear embarrassed Tau Fujian Province spear piece ya offers a sacrifice to peacefully repeatedly makes Egypt
I had a bunch of typos in that last post. I should have re-read it before I posted. "dozen prices" should be "dozen pages" and "fount" should be "found". Sorry.
They advertise as low as 79 cents, but after after skimming through about a dozen prices, the lowest I fount was 99 cents, and many of the songs were $1.14.
I'm not sure if it's easier to write, I suppose it might be for some, but I think it is a lot easier to learn. In order, the first 4 languages I learned were Basic, Assembly, Pascal, and then C.
I think Don (the author) developed it on a 350mhz PII and I had (and still have) a 500mhz Celeron. I got Super Mario Bros to run at 350fps (frame skip of 3, idle detection enabled, tile based engine), so I suspect that it'll run full speed on computers much slower than mine.
I'm a big fan of Sun, but a web browser I wrote in Java back high school in 2000 doesn't work under Sun's 1.4.1 JRE. It had worked under 1.1.8. Now the window layout is all messed up, and many elements, like the image that the page is rendered to, don't appear at all. They lost backward compatibility at some point.
They claim that GUI rendering performance has improved greatly in recent releases, but I've only noticed that my programs run slower now than they used to when I wrote them, when I had a 200mhz pentium.
A lot of the new features are very interesting though, especially if you need to write a lot of network related software. It even has built in gzip support.
If you don't like that, this is sure to piss you off:
http://home.att.net/~r.jarrett/bNES.html
It was the first release quality, full speed NES emulator to be written entirely in Visual Basic.
I contributed most of the graphics and sound code, but stopped working on it during v1.3, and the author has since rewritten large portions of it, fixing some major bugs but introducing many new ones in the process.
I've found that work takes the longest when it's something I dread. Like vague essay assignments & such. Interesting work, however, such as programming, takes almost no time at all. Find your work interesting (or find interesting work) and you'll feel like there's not enough of it to fill your day.
I had made some assumptions on the "didn't know" part. I know it plagued them for months. They have probably 4-5 employees, if you include the owner and his wife.
I know a local business that was hurt badly because the subnet that their ip addresses belonged to was added to a blackhole list. They only bought a few ip addresses and there happened to be a spammer on the same subnet. They never participated in sending spam and were never told that their ip address was blocked. Many of their emails simply did not arrive at their destinations, for no clear reason. They write and sell network security products, intended to help detect and identify hackers or even spammers looking for open relays so that they can be investigated and possibly prosecuted. This was a case where anti-spam technology hurt the near opposite of the kind of people it was meant to. I don't think they ever succeeded in getting their addresses removed from the list. All the time that went by before they knew they were on the blackhole list nearly led them to bankrupty.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding from studying articles on several game copyright and trademark lawsuits is that you can copy the idea of a game as long as you call it something different and produce everything yourself. Copying bitmaps and such from the original is definitely not allowed.
In that sense we'll always have the classics, legally.
Although some game companies, such as Hasbro, have been known to bully clone makers, by taking them to court, losing, and appealing over and over until the defendant is bankrupt.
In one bullying campaign, shareware and freeware sites were spidered for names containing "tris" and threatening emails were sent to webmasters telling them to remove the software or be sued, despite having lost every court case against every author they sued.
I've forgotten what I was replying to. I hope this isn't off topic.
Please forgive my poor spelling.
As someone pointed out earlier, SCO is STILL distributing the disputed kernel with source. By continuing to distribute it mixed with their own GPL-incompliant source code, they are violating the intellectual property rights of everyone who ever contributed to the linux kernel. Without agreeing to the GPL they have no right to distrubute GPL'd software, because nothing else but the GPL gives them that right.
Customers still have to install the patch. Too often they don't. The company has to weigh the effect of that on their business versus the twisted satisfaction they get from taking legal action against someone who helped them debug their software.
He does have a means to protect himself, the secrecy of the exploit.
* If they release a patch, the exploit remains a complete secret, he gets a pat on the back, and everyone is happy.
* If they refuse to release a patch, he can tarnish their reputation by posting of its existence, but without sharing the details of how to exploit it. Demonstrations available upon request to trustworthy security experts.
* If they threaten legal action, he can threaten the release of the exploit.
* If they pursue legal action, full details of the exploit plus the proof of concept appear on hundreds of websites, possibly including Slashdot.
What will SCO think of next? :-\ :-/ :-\
I can't wait to find out.
The suspense is killing me.
It's a good thing I didn't make a donation at http://www.freemikehawash.org/ when this first came out.
But guilty or not, it didn't seem right for him to be held in prison for several months without being charged, calling him a "material witness". One could say they forced his confession, because they admittedly weren't going to let him out until they heard what they wanted.
Forgot to mention: Attach the source code to the chain letter.
Send out an anonymous chain letter to a bunch of random programmers. Say they must send it to 7 other programmers or be eaten by the Taco Bell chihuahua.
Or just put it on Kazaa.
I'm used to OPIE standing for One-time Passwords In Everything. I'm not sure if I can handle the additional confusion this will create.
I visit it every few days to see what's new.
Though I was startled to find that there's a transsexual model out there who appeared in a James Bond film and is married to someone who has the same name as I do. I hope that if I ever become famous nobody will look back on that article and draw the wrong conclusions.
About 4 years ago I decided to stop guessing when Duke Nukem Forever come out. Today I'm glad I didn't let myself waste away with all the other gamers who are waiting for it.
It'll probably be good when it comes out though. But it's entirely possible that some janitor sprayed window cleaner on all the servers, workstations, and tape backups and they've been scrambling to rewrite it ever since.
Just for fun, I thought I would run their privacy policy through babelfish. It didn't work, but I did get a nice sampling of semi-random words.
Here's an excerpt:
the Shanghai little girl shakes chokes the stamp counter
3. Tau infants spear piecE prize gallbladder snow sister-in-law Yao luxurious knee Wei A tau
4. last of the ten Heavenly Stems Tau infants the spear embarrassed Tau Fujian Province spear piece ya offers a sacrifice to peacefully repeatedly makes Egypt
I had a bunch of typos in that last post. I should have re-read it before I posted. "dozen prices" should be "dozen pages" and "fount" should be "found". Sorry.
They advertise as low as 79 cents, but after after skimming through about a dozen prices, the lowest I fount was 99 cents, and many of the songs were $1.14.
Example
That does sound interesting. Now all I can think abour are solar powered heat pump.
> Back in my day I had to write games in BASIC, on a 4.7Mhz computer with no hard disk and 128K of RAM. And I was grateful.
So did I, but for the first year I did it without dos or a tape drive, meaning I couldn't save.
I'm not sure if it's easier to write, I suppose it might be for some, but I think it is a lot easier to learn. In order, the first 4 languages I learned were Basic, Assembly, Pascal, and then C.
...for the day to arrive when most users complain that Windows won't run all their favorite Linux software.
I think Don (the author) developed it on a 350mhz PII and I had (and still have) a 500mhz Celeron. I got Super Mario Bros to run at 350fps (frame skip of 3, idle detection enabled, tile based engine), so I suspect that it'll run full speed on computers much slower than mine.
I'm a big fan of Sun, but a web browser I wrote in Java back high school in 2000 doesn't work under Sun's 1.4.1 JRE. It had worked under 1.1.8. Now the window layout is all messed up, and many elements, like the image that the page is rendered to, don't appear at all. They lost backward compatibility at some point.
They claim that GUI rendering performance has improved greatly in recent releases, but I've only noticed that my programs run slower now than they used to when I wrote them, when I had a 200mhz pentium.
A lot of the new features are very interesting though, especially if you need to write a lot of network related software. It even has built in gzip support.
If you don't like that, this is sure to piss you off:
http://home.att.net/~r.jarrett/bNES.html
It was the first release quality, full speed NES emulator to be written entirely in Visual Basic.
I contributed most of the graphics and sound code, but stopped working on it during v1.3, and the author has since rewritten large portions of it, fixing some major bugs but introducing many new ones in the process.
For being an internet appliance without a hard disk, I expected it to be a lot smaller, but that's a barebone tower pc with a cdrom drive added.
You keep your files & stuff on a usb drive (like one of those pen-sized drives), which you must buy seperately.
I've found that work takes the longest when it's something I dread. Like vague essay assignments & such. Interesting work, however, such as programming, takes almost no time at all. Find your work interesting (or find interesting work) and you'll feel like there's not enough of it to fill your day.
I had made some assumptions on the "didn't know" part. I know it plagued them for months. They have probably 4-5 employees, if you include the owner and his wife.
I know a local business that was hurt badly because the subnet that their ip addresses belonged to was added to a blackhole list. They only bought a few ip addresses and there happened to be a spammer on the same subnet. They never participated in sending spam and were never told that their ip address was blocked. Many of their emails simply did not arrive at their destinations, for no clear reason. They write and sell network security products, intended to help detect and identify hackers or even spammers looking for open relays so that they can be investigated and possibly prosecuted. This was a case where anti-spam technology hurt the near opposite of the kind of people it was meant to. I don't think they ever succeeded in getting their addresses removed from the list. All the time that went by before they knew they were on the blackhole list nearly led them to bankrupty.