I have never bothered to really figure out how top-level domains work, so this may be a stupid idea, but...
Why don't they just sell top-level domains like they do domain names? Some entity could own.com and then some_site.com could purchase some_site from that entity.
This way, we can have an infinite number of top-level domains, and everyone could stop bickering about this.
But how do we figure out how long it took/takes to develop something? If I wanted to patent something for a really long time, I could just say it took me a really long time to develop it. Even if we could somehow monitor progress to get the real development time, there's still a problem. Company X with all its inefficiency might take 10 years to develop something while Person X in his garage might take 10 weeks to do the same thing. Does Company X get a longer patent because they are inefficient?
I'll risk sounding like a looney Libertarian, because I pretty much am one...
Why don't we just have a tax for all media so we can consume as many books, movies, TV shows, whatever, as much as we want?
Why don't we have a tax for healthcare so we can all get as much healthcare as we want?
Why don't we have a tax for cars so we can all have a car?
Since we all have cars, why not a tax for gas so we can all have as much gas as we want?
Why don't we have a tax for phones so we can all talk on the phone as much as we want?
Hell, why don't we just have a tax for everything, and we can all get as much of whatever we want? That would be utopia, right?
Obviously, free music does not equal a free car, but the point is: we do have to draw a line. Tax is theft: taking from one person and giving to another. We probably need tax for tanks and roads and police. But do we really need tax for music? I'm not sure, but I am sure I don't want to keep moving the line.
No shit. I mean, I love a "dead cats turned into fuel" story as much as the next guy, but when the story is actually about a guy saying he didn't turn dead cats into fuel, it's kind of a let-down.
I admit that I'm lazy and that's probably the biggest driving force behind not doing a lot of comments.
But, I find that fellow developers who do comment heavily end up doing this: they write some great code along with some great comments. Then the code is refactored about 20 times, and the comments end up completely out of sync.
And I find this code far more frustrating than uncommented code with meaningful variable names and small functions with meaningful names.
I agree, and it's simple to do this since music has sucked shit for quite some time now. I haven't bought or downloaded music for years. Literally.
Movies though, that's another problem. Those are like crack for me. Even that new Star Wars movie that we all know will suck--I will have to watch it. Just can't stop myself.
Like I said, pardon me for foaming at the mouth. I was probably speaking more to the group of people with your opinion than to you individually. You just happened to be bearing the message at the time. However, I don't feel too bad, since there you go again, saying:
voting for 3rd-party idealist candidate
There's nothing idealist about the Libertarian candidate. The Libertarians are about as far from idealist as you can get. We believe everybody is good and bad in their own peculiar ways and because of that, we don't want a government body imposing one particular will on everyone. We don't believe that the world will suddenly become heaven because of liberty. We just believe that everyone is generally happier and better off when they control their own destiny.
I will vote for the Libertarian candidate because I agree with the Libertarian platform and I believe the current Libertarian candidate would try to uphold that platform. I don't agree with either of the two corporate-sponsored duopoly candidates, and so I see no reason to vote for them.
If you agree with Nader or Cobb or another candidate or even yourself then vote for one of them. Personally, I won't, as you suggested, vote for myself, because:
I don't want the job.
I'm horrible at public speaking.
I agree with Badnarik just as much as I agree with myself, and so I might as well pool my vote for Badnarik.
Since I haven't campaigned and no one knows me, there is no chance of me winning. I believe that 1% going to Badnarik could show up on someone's radar. I don't believe one vote for me will show up anywhere.
So I do vote pragmatically. I'm just arguing that you should stop telling other people (or yourself for that matter) that they are wasting their vote, especially when you're using the argument that they're wasting it on some idealistic dream. If you believe Kerry will do a fine job, then vote for Kerry. I just personally feel that Kerry will do only a minor shade of gray better than Bush, so I want to spend my vote on Badnarik.
I'll also be one of those "idealists" voting for Badnarik, and my defense to your "pragmatism" is:
If I had used "pragmatic" judgement in the last election, I'd have voted for Bush. I couldn't imagine voting for someone who said he "took the initiative in creating the internet." (Let's not get into what Gore meant by that--it just made him sound like an idiot.) Besides that, I liked the idea of tax cuts, because tax cuts generally mean smaller goverment. So Bush sounded like the lesser of two evils. However, I took the "idealist" approach and voted for the Libertarian candidate. And for that, I can now sleep at night. Cause wouldn't you know it, voting for the lesser of two evils gave people evil. If I use pragmatic judgement in this election and vote for Kerry, who knows what I'll end up with? Kerry sounds like the lesser of two evils, but we'll probably still have a neverending war. We'll probably get a Patriot Act II. We'll probably get on the road towards government health care. And we'll probably get crap I can't even fathom right now. Why should I vote for that if I don't agree with any of it?
I would be voting for Kerry if he had proved something to me. But he hasn't. Go to factcheck.org and look at the facts on the debates. Both sides had lie after lie. (Okay, misleading statement after misleading statement--same thing to me.) I can't vote for someone unless I believe what he says. And if most of what he says isn't really true, I can't believe him.
Yes, there's a good chance my vote won't affect the outcome of this election. Personally, I don't think it matters who wins, so I'm instead investing my vote into a hopeful future. I hope that with these close races, the percentage of votes going to 3rd party candidates will become more meaningful. Perhaps the Democrats will lose and realize they need instant runoff or approval voting so that I can vote for Badnarik and Kerry. And that will be a happy day for me.
This is still a free country. Don't go lecturing me on how I should use my vote. It's my vote, and I will use it however the fuck I want to. Sorry for foaming at the mouth, but arguments like this are pissing me off. If "pragmatic" people like you would vote their conscience instead of following the herd of sheep, we might actually be able to get out of this mess.
I don't want someone randomly pushing a button or punching a hole just to get a lottery ticket, but I do want everybody to have a decent chance to vote. A normal 9 to 5 workday plus traffic just doesn't leave much time left for voting, so you've got a big line in the morning or a big line in the evening. In a free country, election day is the most important day of the year. Why shouldn't it be a holiday?
"Should" have earned $10 billion? Exactly where can I get an official stamp that says I "should" get some amount of money? As far as I'm aware, the universe doesn't grant anyone the right to make a certain amount of money. And as far as I'm aware, neither does our constitution. It does grant you the right to try and make money off of your ideas. And copyright and patent laws do to some degree restrict others from making money off of your ideas. But the only thing keeping me from copying a DVD is the DMCA. It's not even illegal to copy a movie for a friend--it's just illegal for me to circumvent the worthless bit of encryption on the DVD. For that, I can go to jail for 5 years. And no, I'm not saying this to justify my copying of DVDs. I've never even copied a single DVD. I just think it's stupid that someone can conceivably be put in jail for 5 years and/or be fined $500,000 for copying some ones and zeroes. And I think it's absolutely insane that the MPAA was able to buy our Senators and Representatives and write their own laws in order to try and control the flow of money in their direction.
Except that unlike Microsoft, I don't think DISCover or the licensees care. They're not selling these at a loss and then making money on the games. They're just trying to make money on the consoles.
I'd agree, if there were just going to be one DISCover system. Then I could buy a game that said DISCover on it and know it would work.
Unfortunately, the ApeXtreme player is just one of many possible players. Buying a box that says DISCover won't mean anything, because different players will have different specs, just like PCs.
I think it would have been smarter for DISCover to require some logo like D1, D2, etc. which designated certain minimum requirements. Who's to say game makers would actually adhere to that, but at least they would have something to adhere to. As it is now, they'll just keep putting system requirements on the box. I don't think they'll add "ApeXtreme Model XYZ" to the box.
Did I miss something? How is this going to solve that problem?
With a console, the problem is solved because you buy a game for a specific version of a specific console (i.e. PS2). But this ApeXtreme will just be a PC, so when a new game comes out that uses FUBAR 5000XZ, you'll have to buy a new ApeXtreme (or other DISCover system) that supports the features of FUBAR 5000XZ.
The problem could be solved if they put a label on the front of each system that said Level 1 and then the games said "works with Level 1 DISCover system." Then you'd know not to buy Level 2 DISCover games unless you had a Level 2 system. But they could just do this solution for all PCs if the PC makers, game makers, card makers, etc. would organize the effort.
Having said that, it still seems cool to be able to go to Best Buy and buy a nice HTPC for a decent price that will look decent sitting next to all my other components. That's what I see as the real benefit. To nitpick, personally, I'd prefer black though.
Of course, that's an excellent reason to do something--it's the reason I do most things outside of my job, including game programming. I guess the question should have been:
How can making single-player open source games get me out of my day job?
There are shareware game developers that make money (and thus get out of day jobs), because they enforce registration. How can someone make money with an open source game?
This could be its own Ask Slashdot post, but it seems relevant enough here.
It's clear why Linux makes people money. Because it's not trivial to put together a distribution, people will pay for one. People will also pay for support. And Linus gets paid to do speeches.
It's clear why things like Zope or JBoss make money. Because it's not trivial to build a website, people will pay someone else to do it or they'll pay for training.
It's clear how a multiplayer game could make money. Sell subscriptions to access the servers hosting the game.
But a single-player game seems the most contradictory to an open source model. People buy the game and essentially throw it away (as a couple other posters have mentioned). If others can just redistribute the game for free and undercut the cost of the original developer, then the developer has no incentive to produce the game in the first place. And the better the game is, the less money you would make, because the game would spread that much faster.
I'm trying to get into game development, and I can see only three reasons for making open source software: I think I can make a game that's so great that other people want to advertise on my site. I think I can make a game that's so great people will want to buy t-shirts and hats. Or I think I can make a game that's good enough that a company will hire me--to help make a proprietarty game!
Can someone dispute this?
Slashdot Mirror
http://pag.csail.mit.edu/~adonovan/dilbert/show.ph p?day=24&month=02&year=2000
I think they should rename the PS3 to XBox, because that goes really well with XFire.
I have never bothered to really figure out how top-level domains work, so this may be a stupid idea, but...
.com and then some_site.com could purchase some_site from that entity.
Why don't they just sell top-level domains like they do domain names? Some entity could own
This way, we can have an infinite number of top-level domains, and everyone could stop bickering about this.
I think it's time to start using an offshore tunneling service.
Oh, wait, then I'll probably be a suspected terrorist.
This whole guilty until provent innocent thing really sucks.
But how do we figure out how long it took/takes to develop something? If I wanted to patent something for a really long time, I could just say it took me a really long time to develop it. Even if we could somehow monitor progress to get the real development time, there's still a problem. Company X with all its inefficiency might take 10 years to develop something while Person X in his garage might take 10 weeks to do the same thing. Does Company X get a longer patent because they are inefficient?
I'll risk sounding like a looney Libertarian, because I pretty much am one...
Why don't we just have a tax for all media so we can consume as many books, movies, TV shows, whatever, as much as we want?
Why don't we have a tax for healthcare so we can all get as much healthcare as we want?
Why don't we have a tax for cars so we can all have a car?
Since we all have cars, why not a tax for gas so we can all have as much gas as we want?
Why don't we have a tax for phones so we can all talk on the phone as much as we want?
Hell, why don't we just have a tax for everything, and we can all get as much of whatever we want? That would be utopia, right?
Obviously, free music does not equal a free car, but the point is: we do have to draw a line. Tax is theft: taking from one person and giving to another. We probably need tax for tanks and roads and police. But do we really need tax for music? I'm not sure, but I am sure I don't want to keep moving the line.
No shit. I mean, I love a "dead cats turned into fuel" story as much as the next guy, but when the story is actually about a guy saying he didn't turn dead cats into fuel, it's kind of a let-down.
Is that they often end up not matching the code.
I admit that I'm lazy and that's probably the biggest driving force behind not doing a lot of comments.
But, I find that fellow developers who do comment heavily end up doing this: they write some great code along with some great comments. Then the code is refactored about 20 times, and the comments end up completely out of sync.
And I find this code far more frustrating than uncommented code with meaningful variable names and small functions with meaningful names.
I agree, and it's simple to do this since music has sucked shit for quite some time now. I haven't bought or downloaded music for years. Literally.
Movies though, that's another problem. Those are like crack for me. Even that new Star Wars movie that we all know will suck--I will have to watch it. Just can't stop myself.
voting for 3rd-party idealist candidate
There's nothing idealist about the Libertarian candidate. The Libertarians are about as far from idealist as you can get. We believe everybody is good and bad in their own peculiar ways and because of that, we don't want a government body imposing one particular will on everyone. We don't believe that the world will suddenly become heaven because of liberty. We just believe that everyone is generally happier and better off when they control their own destiny.
I will vote for the Libertarian candidate because I agree with the Libertarian platform and I believe the current Libertarian candidate would try to uphold that platform. I don't agree with either of the two corporate-sponsored duopoly candidates, and so I see no reason to vote for them.
If you agree with Nader or Cobb or another candidate or even yourself then vote for one of them. Personally, I won't, as you suggested, vote for myself, because:
- I don't want the job.
- I'm horrible at public speaking.
- I agree with Badnarik just as much as I agree with myself, and so I might as well pool my vote for Badnarik.
- Since I haven't campaigned and no one knows me, there is no chance of me winning. I believe that 1% going to Badnarik could show up on someone's radar. I don't believe one vote for me will show up anywhere.
So I do vote pragmatically. I'm just arguing that you should stop telling other people (or yourself for that matter) that they are wasting their vote, especially when you're using the argument that they're wasting it on some idealistic dream. If you believe Kerry will do a fine job, then vote for Kerry. I just personally feel that Kerry will do only a minor shade of gray better than Bush, so I want to spend my vote on Badnarik.I'd much rather see a national voting holiday.
I don't want someone randomly pushing a button or punching a hole just to get a lottery ticket, but I do want everybody to have a decent chance to vote. A normal 9 to 5 workday plus traffic just doesn't leave much time left for voting, so you've got a big line in the morning or a big line in the evening. In a free country, election day is the most important day of the year. Why shouldn't it be a holiday?
two inches by three inches, one month per page, with room to write things on each day
Huh?
"Should" have earned $10 billion? Exactly where can I get an official stamp that says I "should" get some amount of money? As far as I'm aware, the universe doesn't grant anyone the right to make a certain amount of money. And as far as I'm aware, neither does our constitution. It does grant you the right to try and make money off of your ideas. And copyright and patent laws do to some degree restrict others from making money off of your ideas. But the only thing keeping me from copying a DVD is the DMCA. It's not even illegal to copy a movie for a friend--it's just illegal for me to circumvent the worthless bit of encryption on the DVD. For that, I can go to jail for 5 years. And no, I'm not saying this to justify my copying of DVDs. I've never even copied a single DVD. I just think it's stupid that someone can conceivably be put in jail for 5 years and/or be fined $500,000 for copying some ones and zeroes. And I think it's absolutely insane that the MPAA was able to buy our Senators and Representatives and write their own laws in order to try and control the flow of money in their direction.
Maybe they're skipping DVI, since it already has a replacment.
http://www.hdmi.com
Except that unlike Microsoft, I don't think DISCover or the licensees care. They're not selling these at a loss and then making money on the games. They're just trying to make money on the consoles.
I'd agree, if there were just going to be one DISCover system. Then I could buy a game that said DISCover on it and know it would work.
Unfortunately, the ApeXtreme player is just one of many possible players. Buying a box that says DISCover won't mean anything, because different players will have different specs, just like PCs.
I think it would have been smarter for DISCover to require some logo like D1, D2, etc. which designated certain minimum requirements. Who's to say game makers would actually adhere to that, but at least they would have something to adhere to. As it is now, they'll just keep putting system requirements on the box. I don't think they'll add "ApeXtreme Model XYZ" to the box.
Did I miss something? How is this going to solve that problem?
With a console, the problem is solved because you buy a game for a specific version of a specific console (i.e. PS2). But this ApeXtreme will just be a PC, so when a new game comes out that uses FUBAR 5000XZ, you'll have to buy a new ApeXtreme (or other DISCover system) that supports the features of FUBAR 5000XZ.
The problem could be solved if they put a label on the front of each system that said Level 1 and then the games said "works with Level 1 DISCover system." Then you'd know not to buy Level 2 DISCover games unless you had a Level 2 system. But they could just do this solution for all PCs if the PC makers, game makers, card makers, etc. would organize the effort.
Having said that, it still seems cool to be able to go to Best Buy and buy a nice HTPC for a decent price that will look decent sitting next to all my other components. That's what I see as the real benefit. To nitpick, personally, I'd prefer black though.
Of course, that's an excellent reason to do something--it's the reason I do most things outside of my job, including game programming. I guess the question should have been:
How can making single-player open source games get me out of my day job?
There are shareware game developers that make money (and thus get out of day jobs), because they enforce registration. How can someone make money with an open source game?
This could be its own Ask Slashdot post, but it seems relevant enough here. It's clear why Linux makes people money. Because it's not trivial to put together a distribution, people will pay for one. People will also pay for support. And Linus gets paid to do speeches. It's clear why things like Zope or JBoss make money. Because it's not trivial to build a website, people will pay someone else to do it or they'll pay for training. It's clear how a multiplayer game could make money. Sell subscriptions to access the servers hosting the game. But a single-player game seems the most contradictory to an open source model. People buy the game and essentially throw it away (as a couple other posters have mentioned). If others can just redistribute the game for free and undercut the cost of the original developer, then the developer has no incentive to produce the game in the first place. And the better the game is, the less money you would make, because the game would spread that much faster. I'm trying to get into game development, and I can see only three reasons for making open source software: I think I can make a game that's so great that other people want to advertise on my site. I think I can make a game that's so great people will want to buy t-shirts and hats. Or I think I can make a game that's good enough that a company will hire me--to help make a proprietarty game! Can someone dispute this?