Richard M. Stallman is a 53-year-old anticorporate crusader who has argued for 20 years that most software should be free of charge.
RMS quote:
"I think it is ok for authors (please let's not call them "creators", they are not gods) to ask for money for copies of their works (please let's not devalue these works by calling them "content") in order to gain income (the term "compensation" falsely implies it is a matter of making up for some kind of damages)."
The guy is wakko, but you know why he's so successful? Because people make a god or demon out of him; hes neither. The guy has obviously spent some time learning the history of copyright/patent/trademark laws, and thats more than most can say.
He understands that copyright law was enacted to benifit the public, not the author. He understands that patent laws were enacted to encourage publication, and that trademark laws try and enforce a certain level of market transparency for.. gee, the public.
His ideas may come across as complicated and pedantic to people; which is the way it should be. We're talking about the systems that were put in place to encourage the advancement of science, technology, and culture here.
FTFA:
Cisco caved in to Stallman's demands rather than endure months of abuse from his noisy worldwide cult of online jihadists.
As soon as you agree with an article that demogogues by using the word "jihad", you might begin to question the source. RMS, that crazy nut, is basically pointing out that the last 500 years of laws based on intellectual property arn't based upon secrecy; they're based on encouraging publication while granting the author (and more importantly, denying the state) a relatively modest amount of control over the invention or creative work. In other words, he realizes that we've all been through this before, and its the public domain that needs protecting, not the author, because in lieu of laws that protect the public right to its own culture and technological innovation, we end up with something that very closely mirrors a feudalist system with a barrier to market that would make Adam Smith rise from the dead to slap us silly. The guy might be a little too over the edge, but anyone with a basic grasp on the history of copyright, patent, and trademark laws should immediately understand where hes coming from. This article does little else than cry wolf for some tech companies. I work for tech companies, as a programmer. They won't live or die based on licenses of available technologies. This is just a bunch of whining.
All of those were not created by MS owned factories, but rather rebranded hardware. If I put a sticker with my name on your mouse, will you call it mine?
They'll all show up at your door one day and go, "Wern't you the guy who dropped incredible internet science at slashdot? Our one single panel broke, and we're out a vast amount of money. Apparently, you're the man who will lead us into the next generation of solar powered offices."
It is definately on the high end, which sucks. No argument here.
But I've played around with it, in house, and I'm absolutely convinced that once developers start getting creative with it, watch out.
There is a pattern emergin in many upcoming Wii games. I'm not sure if other people have noticed, but from a game design standpoint, a lot of games are focused on 'mini games'. Those familiar with the Warioware brand or the Monkey Ball brand I'm sure are aware of the term, but a startling number of games coming out for the Wii make minigames the core focus. And there is a reason. These games a comparitively low budget (development wise) exercises in order to find out what makes using the controller fun. I am pretty convinced that after the first round, or possibly second round, some game will come around that makes people smack their foreheads, going, "I never knew my favorite kind of game was more fun using this type of controller."
A lot of work has to be done on the developer side to filter input from the controller, and to tune how to interpret the results of the accelerometers and the pointing device SDKs. Once that initial round of solidifying up your in-house Wii input library happens, I'm pretty convinced we'll start to see games that make you wonder why dual analogue is the defacto standard. Everytime I've played one of the Wii projects at work under development, I've resolved that I'm not even going to risk it; the Wii is getting pre-ordered the day Futureshop starts accepting them.
Based on the surprise Splinter Cell announcement, and a few other late announcements, I think some game designers have realized that one analog and one pointer is better than two analogs.
I'm not one to judge a company on one purchase, but I have to chime in here. I went through 3 Sony cybershots via the warentee before I found one that wouldn't refuse to open its flimsy plastic shutter when you powered it up after about 2 weeks of use.
It was easily the worst experience I've ever had with any consumer electronics, and ultimately, I probably should have returned it except it broke on day 17, 2 days after the full exchange policy expires and the replacement one takes over.
I liked the quality of the pictures, the features (except for the bullshit sony proprietary memory stick, of course,) but the thing was built like a sheet of paper folded around with 300 dollars worth of camera eqipment inside.
I can live with their clock radios, their cheap audio componants like bud headphones, and such, but anything that I deem is ever going to have a chance of being scratched, or moved off of its stationary poisition will never be a Sony again. To me Sony is only worth it if you're paying an extra 10$ so you dont have to buy 3rd party brand earphones or clockradios. (Although I do have a pair of 200$ Sony studiophones (MDR-V600s) going on 2 years here, and they've held up remarkably well, although I'm sure some true audiophile can lay the beat down on me for the audio quality.)
Anyhow, the upshoot is, never ever buy a Sony camera. They're complete crap.
Keep in mind that the Sony devkits are 15,000 to 20,000. The test kits are significantly cheaper, but you can't debug live on those.. in that case, you probably have to be a big company, or if you are small, all 30 of you share one kit.
Its definately an artificial barrier to entry, more so than the Wii which simply requires some evidence of proficiency and a desire to create commercial success on the Wii platform.
You don't have to be a large company. You do have to be a business tho, and be able to demonstrate that you're profit oriented and have created games in the past.
Not an unreasonable demand, really.. its not like you have to be Namco, you just have to be serious about it.
Since the question is about gaming, I think pings rather than cost are more relevent.
So if we have each truck up on the network the speed can drop quite rapidly. I can't remember what the latency was like, though
What you're saying is that you're unable to provide any meaningful contribution to his question. I might as well tell an electrical engineer how Maya performs under 3d game modelling circumstances.
But gaming is low throughput.. it depends more on latency.. and guess what happens when you send a signal up, bounce it off something in space, and send it back down. You guessed it. Shitty gaming.
I had satillite for a brief while. It almost doesn't matter how far along the technology gets, the physical limitations of the technology make it completely unsuitable for gaming.
First of all, it comes as no surprise to me that there is some debate as to the actual phrase. You should be really really careful when you correct somebody over a trivial matter because more often than not, you're running headlong into a tangential nerd-cliff where everybody stops looking at the forest and starts arguing over one leaf on one tree in that forest.
Nobody ever said Let them eat cake either, but correcting somebody when they utter those words to illustrate a point is about as pedantic as you can be. If the meaning of the phrase is retained, and the message is succinctly conveyed, what the hell is so important about the words unless you're quoting them with the actual intention of accurate archival?
Many criminals are just people who don't believe there is such a thing as trust and opportunity. You're breeding them. Labour is something you invest in, not cultivate.
Cute, but incorrect. Both cost you money and time. I'm a huge freeware user, and OSS believer, but money and time are interchangable for the purposes of determining 'learning time' and such.
I'm always blown away by the burning need people have to seperate time and money, and justify purchases based on one or the other, but rarely both.
Since the customer never experiences a fully transparent market, its pretty obvious that we can only base decisions on a perceived balance of money and time.
As a games programmer, it'd be equally easy to create a bot for any game, given the 'rules'.. action, rpg, FPS, strategy, or whatever.
I think what you were trying to say is, "I like RPGS", not "I consider action games as easier to beat when a 6 year old programmer friend of mine constructs a bot for it and screw the world for lumping RPGs into the action genre."
All games are easy fodder for bots if game supports them. If you think RPGs are 'deeper' than action games, well, then its time to argue about what 'deeper' means in relation to games. What makes a game deeper? RPGS are susceptible to bots, but there isn't the community or need for them, nor the APIs made available by the developers. In fact, alot of RPGs contain allies that you dont control. I can assure you that programming their behavoir is one of the easiest tasks of making an RPG. The real challenge to the job is making them die sometimes due to 'believable' human behavoir.
In short; its a touching and beautiful thought that RPGs somehow represent some kind of advanced paradigm for videogames. In reality, its just a genre, and if you like it (I love RPGs) then good on you. Thinking there is some kind of technical superiority to RPGs is a big mistake, tho.
The joke was funny, and unless somebody emails his wife and forces her to read the joke, I don't think there is any great transgression here.
We've all known people who mean a great deal to us who have died. I don't feel constrained not to tease them post-humously.
From where I'm standing, 'get out of your moms basement' and 'go hump a dog' are the kinds of insults that come from a person who I'd never want at my funeral. You big party pooper you.
You pretty much have to argue on that basis, because while I'm comfortable with the idea of monkeys being kept in captivity for the sake of scientific study, opponants can assert that captivity alone constitutes suffering. So far, we havn't reached the point where we can legally define what 'consent' is when it comes to animals, so until then, we're stuck to trying to figure out what is reasonable without explicit consent from the monkeys he studied.
Pain and suffering is not only physical. Many would argue that the non-observable kind of suffering is more important.
That said, I don't have a lick of concerns about the ethics of his studies. I'm very confident that his research did not involve inflicting physical harm on the subjects. I'm just pointing out that its probably the captivity itself that angers his opponants, and I'd say trying to firebomb his house suggests that they consider the captivity a form of suffering.
Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others
The experiment dealt with people following authority, not people who could observe a transparent processes involving all participants (or representatives of those participants) and decide whether or not the 'general will' of that society had reached a compromise and conclusion that dictated codes of acceptable behaviour.
While I can see what you're implying, I don't think its relevant to this discussion.
> Jim Bob in his trailer doesn't know shit when it comes to things like genetics and animal testing, yet his vote gets the same weight as someone with a Ph.D. in Biology.
I used to feel this way. Tough shit on me. Jim Bob is a human being, I'm a human being, and I'll be damned if I will have my vote discounted regarding hunting (which I don't do) just because I don't hunt. Its a compromise. We do use some level of judging 'expertise' in determining acceptable social practices. For instance, in this example, Jim Bob is unlikely to actually be on the committee. In fact, hes likely not to show up and vote; not because hes stupid, but because hes ambivilent. Thats his choice.
> An action is not ok just because a committee says it is, or because 'law enforcement agencies' say it is; one can't even prove an objective 'good' or 'bad' exists in the first place. I say just go with a means test. What kind of society do we want, and will this take us there? If the answer is yes, then go for it, no matter what it is and no matter what the cost.
Everything you say, I agree with. Not one word do I disagree with here.
Okay, so now propose what is a 'society we want' and whether or not a given action 'will take us there'. Now figure out who gets to determine if the answer is 'yes' and 'no'.
Being in university was great, because you got to argue about this shit all the time while missing the bigger point. Everything you just said requires some level of consensus between different people via some social structure. It's almost like you took my point and in trying to disagree with it, inadvertantly pointed out that sometimes we have to change our methods of coming to a concensus. That doesn't much change a commitment towards contributing to those discussions, or whats wrong with not adhering to the decision of a concensus.
What I was saying is that, given my country and provicial and municipal concensus', I respect the act of working through those channels over not. Can they make mistakes, and can I contibute to the wrong decision? Absolutely, but I'd rather do it slowly and with much discussion than quickly and in secrecy. Would I really light the firebomb? Truthfully, I think such a decision could never happen under the structure that I advocate. Maybe the real point is I believe suffering will never stop, and I'd rather make decisions on how to minimize it slowly and with lots of debate; if we act with haste to 'eradicate' suffering, we just perpetuate it out of short sighted passion. I believe that its more important to compromise on suffering than blindly strike in an ineffectual and backlash-inducing way that simply garauntees that more of it will occurr.
I think you're generalizing, as is the poster. Any language that enhances some level of procedual comfort and focuses on math is good.
My biggest complaint about most programmers that I've worked for is that they're so about the language and not enough about the actual math/calc and the inherent strengths and weaknesses of a given approach to design.
If anything, my suggestion would be any language, but make sure you're teaching them programming and math, not "this is BASIC" or "this is LOGO". Anything you can do to de-stress any real commitment to a syntax, language type, and API is going to impart far more important values. Teach them what a hammer is, but make sure they know that not everything in programming is a nail.
Slashdot Mirror
Article:
.. gee, the public.
Richard M. Stallman is a 53-year-old anticorporate crusader who has argued for 20 years that most software should be free of charge.
RMS quote:
"I think it is ok for authors (please let's not call them "creators", they are not gods) to ask for money for copies of their works (please let's not devalue these works by calling them "content") in order to gain income (the term "compensation" falsely implies it is a matter of making up for some kind of damages)."
The guy is wakko, but you know why he's so successful? Because people make a god or demon out of him; hes neither. The guy has obviously spent some time learning the history of copyright/patent/trademark laws, and thats more than most can say.
He understands that copyright law was enacted to benifit the public, not the author. He understands that patent laws were enacted to encourage publication, and that trademark laws try and enforce a certain level of market transparency for
His ideas may come across as complicated and pedantic to people; which is the way it should be. We're talking about the systems that were put in place to encourage the advancement of science, technology, and culture here.
FTFA:
Cisco caved in to Stallman's demands rather than endure months of abuse from his noisy worldwide cult of online jihadists.
As soon as you agree with an article that demogogues by using the word "jihad", you might begin to question the source. RMS, that crazy nut, is basically pointing out that the last 500 years of laws based on intellectual property arn't based upon secrecy; they're based on encouraging publication while granting the author (and more importantly, denying the state) a relatively modest amount of control over the invention or creative work. In other words, he realizes that we've all been through this before, and its the public domain that needs protecting, not the author, because in lieu of laws that protect the public right to its own culture and technological innovation, we end up with something that very closely mirrors a feudalist system with a barrier to market that would make Adam Smith rise from the dead to slap us silly. The guy might be a little too over the edge, but anyone with a basic grasp on the history of copyright, patent, and trademark laws should immediately understand where hes coming from. This article does little else than cry wolf for some tech companies. I work for tech companies, as a programmer. They won't live or die based on licenses of available technologies. This is just a bunch of whining.
That wasn't MS hardware. That was somebody's hardware with MS's marketing and sticker behind it.
All of those were not created by MS owned factories, but rather rebranded hardware. If I put a sticker with my name on your mouse, will you call it mine?
They'll all show up at your door one day and go, "Wern't you the guy who dropped incredible internet science at slashdot? Our one single panel broke, and we're out a vast amount of money. Apparently, you're the man who will lead us into the next generation of solar powered offices."
And me. Probably the something to do with the Youtube flash app. Or maybe flash itself.
No offense to you, but MegaTF was/is a pockmark on humanity.
Q1 TF all the way; Mega was just plain silly. 20 people going for frags, and two scouts with jetpacks running flags while everyone ignored them. =)
Kudos on #5 tho; with you all the way there.
How could you be possibly goaded into reponding to that. I'm crying on the inside for you.
It's as dumb as saying one of those stupid "dogs" that bimbos like Paris Hiton carry around are guard dogs.
Its actually way less dumb than that metaphor. I agree with your first sentence, but the second is a perfect example of quitting while you're ahead.
Yikes, btw, the wireless 360 controller is 50$ at bestbuy, the wired, 40$ .. what was that about 30$ controllers?!
It is definately on the high end, which sucks. No argument here.
But I've played around with it, in house, and I'm absolutely convinced that once developers start getting creative with it, watch out.
There is a pattern emergin in many upcoming Wii games. I'm not sure if other people have noticed, but from a game design standpoint, a lot of games are focused on 'mini games'. Those familiar with the Warioware brand or the Monkey Ball brand I'm sure are aware of the term, but a startling number of games coming out for the Wii make minigames the core focus. And there is a reason. These games a comparitively low budget (development wise) exercises in order to find out what makes using the controller fun. I am pretty convinced that after the first round, or possibly second round, some game will come around that makes people smack their foreheads, going, "I never knew my favorite kind of game was more fun using this type of controller."
A lot of work has to be done on the developer side to filter input from the controller, and to tune how to interpret the results of the accelerometers and the pointing device SDKs. Once that initial round of solidifying up your in-house Wii input library happens, I'm pretty convinced we'll start to see games that make you wonder why dual analogue is the defacto standard. Everytime I've played one of the Wii projects at work under development, I've resolved that I'm not even going to risk it; the Wii is getting pre-ordered the day Futureshop starts accepting them.
Based on the surprise Splinter Cell announcement, and a few other late announcements, I think some game designers have realized that one analog and one pointer is better than two analogs.
I'm not one to judge a company on one purchase, but I have to chime in here. I went through 3 Sony cybershots via the warentee before I found one that wouldn't refuse to open its flimsy plastic shutter when you powered it up after about 2 weeks of use.
It was easily the worst experience I've ever had with any consumer electronics, and ultimately, I probably should have returned it except it broke on day 17, 2 days after the full exchange policy expires and the replacement one takes over.
I liked the quality of the pictures, the features (except for the bullshit sony proprietary memory stick, of course,) but the thing was built like a sheet of paper folded around with 300 dollars worth of camera eqipment inside.
I can live with their clock radios, their cheap audio componants like bud headphones, and such, but anything that I deem is ever going to have a chance of being scratched, or moved off of its stationary poisition will never be a Sony again. To me Sony is only worth it if you're paying an extra 10$ so you dont have to buy 3rd party brand earphones or clockradios. (Although I do have a pair of 200$ Sony studiophones (MDR-V600s) going on 2 years here, and they've held up remarkably well, although I'm sure some true audiophile can lay the beat down on me for the audio quality.)
Anyhow, the upshoot is, never ever buy a Sony camera. They're complete crap.
Keep in mind that the Sony devkits are 15,000 to 20,000. The test kits are significantly cheaper, but you can't debug live on those .. in that case, you probably have to be a big company, or if you are small, all 30 of you share one kit.
Its definately an artificial barrier to entry, more so than the Wii which simply requires some evidence of proficiency and a desire to create commercial success on the Wii platform.
You don't have to be a large company. You do have to be a business tho, and be able to demonstrate that you're profit oriented and have created games in the past.
.. its not like you have to be Namco, you just have to be serious about it.
Not an unreasonable demand, really
Huh? I had satillite for 60$ a month, and they payed for the dish themselves. I assumed we were talking small dish here ..
Since the question is about gaming, I think pings rather than cost are more relevent.
So if we have each truck up on the network the speed can drop quite rapidly. I can't remember what the latency was like, though
What you're saying is that you're unable to provide any meaningful contribution to his question. I might as well tell an electrical engineer how Maya performs under 3d game modelling circumstances.
But gaming is low throughput .. it depends more on latency .. and guess what happens when you send a signal up, bounce it off something in space, and send it back down. You guessed it. Shitty gaming.
I had satillite for a brief while. It almost doesn't matter how far along the technology gets, the physical limitations of the technology make it completely unsuitable for gaming.
First of all, it comes as no surprise to me that there is some debate as to the actual phrase. You should be really really careful when you correct somebody over a trivial matter because more often than not, you're running headlong into a tangential nerd-cliff where everybody stops looking at the forest and starts arguing over one leaf on one tree in that forest.
Nobody ever said Let them eat cake either, but correcting somebody when they utter those words to illustrate a point is about as pedantic as you can be. If the meaning of the phrase is retained, and the message is succinctly conveyed, what the hell is so important about the words unless you're quoting them with the actual intention of accurate archival?
Many criminals are just people who don't believe there is such a thing as trust and opportunity. You're breeding them. Labour is something you invest in, not cultivate.
Cute, but incorrect. Both cost you money and time. I'm a huge freeware user, and OSS believer, but money and time are interchangable for the purposes of determining 'learning time' and such.
I'm always blown away by the burning need people have to seperate time and money, and justify purchases based on one or the other, but rarely both.
Since the customer never experiences a fully transparent market, its pretty obvious that we can only base decisions on a perceived balance of money and time.
As a games programmer, it'd be equally easy to create a bot for any game, given the 'rules' .. action, rpg, FPS, strategy, or whatever.
I think what you were trying to say is, "I like RPGS", not "I consider action games as easier to beat when a 6 year old programmer friend of mine constructs a bot for it and screw the world for lumping RPGs into the action genre."
All games are easy fodder for bots if game supports them. If you think RPGs are 'deeper' than action games, well, then its time to argue about what 'deeper' means in relation to games. What makes a game deeper? RPGS are susceptible to bots, but there isn't the community or need for them, nor the APIs made available by the developers. In fact, alot of RPGs contain allies that you dont control. I can assure you that programming their behavoir is one of the easiest tasks of making an RPG. The real challenge to the job is making them die sometimes due to 'believable' human behavoir.
In short; its a touching and beautiful thought that RPGs somehow represent some kind of advanced paradigm for videogames. In reality, its just a genre, and if you like it (I love RPGs) then good on you. Thinking there is some kind of technical superiority to RPGs is a big mistake, tho.
It is a loss. Steve Irwin was a great guy.
The joke was funny, and unless somebody emails his wife and forces her to read the joke, I don't think there is any great transgression here.
We've all known people who mean a great deal to us who have died. I don't feel constrained not to tease them post-humously.
From where I'm standing, 'get out of your moms basement' and 'go hump a dog' are the kinds of insults that come from a person who I'd never want at my funeral. You big party pooper you.
You pretty much have to argue on that basis, because while I'm comfortable with the idea of monkeys being kept in captivity for the sake of scientific study, opponants can assert that captivity alone constitutes suffering. So far, we havn't reached the point where we can legally define what 'consent' is when it comes to animals, so until then, we're stuck to trying to figure out what is reasonable without explicit consent from the monkeys he studied.
Pain and suffering is not only physical. Many would argue that the non-observable kind of suffering is more important.
That said, I don't have a lick of concerns about the ethics of his studies. I'm very confident that his research did not involve inflicting physical harm on the subjects. I'm just pointing out that its probably the captivity itself that angers his opponants, and I'd say trying to firebomb his house suggests that they consider the captivity a form of suffering.
I'm familiar with it. From the article:
Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others
The experiment dealt with people following authority, not people who could observe a transparent processes involving all participants (or representatives of those participants) and decide whether or not the 'general will' of that society had reached a compromise and conclusion that dictated codes of acceptable behaviour.
While I can see what you're implying, I don't think its relevant to this discussion.
> Jim Bob in his trailer doesn't know shit when it comes to things like genetics and animal testing, yet his vote gets the same weight as someone with a Ph.D. in Biology.
I used to feel this way. Tough shit on me. Jim Bob is a human being, I'm a human being, and I'll be damned if I will have my vote discounted regarding hunting (which I don't do) just because I don't hunt. Its a compromise. We do use some level of judging 'expertise' in determining acceptable social practices. For instance, in this example, Jim Bob is unlikely to actually be on the committee. In fact, hes likely not to show up and vote; not because hes stupid, but because hes ambivilent. Thats his choice.
> An action is not ok just because a committee says it is, or because 'law enforcement agencies' say it is; one can't even prove an objective 'good' or 'bad' exists in the first place. I say just go with a means test. What kind of society do we want, and will this take us there? If the answer is yes, then go for it, no matter what it is and no matter what the cost.
Everything you say, I agree with. Not one word do I disagree with here.
Okay, so now propose what is a 'society we want' and whether or not a given action 'will take us there'. Now figure out who gets to determine if the answer is 'yes' and 'no'.
Being in university was great, because you got to argue about this shit all the time while missing the bigger point. Everything you just said requires some level of consensus between different people via some social structure. It's almost like you took my point and in trying to disagree with it, inadvertantly pointed out that sometimes we have to change our methods of coming to a concensus. That doesn't much change a commitment towards contributing to those discussions, or whats wrong with not adhering to the decision of a concensus.
What I was saying is that, given my country and provicial and municipal concensus', I respect the act of working through those channels over not. Can they make mistakes, and can I contibute to the wrong decision? Absolutely, but I'd rather do it slowly and with much discussion than quickly and in secrecy. Would I really light the firebomb? Truthfully, I think such a decision could never happen under the structure that I advocate. Maybe the real point is I believe suffering will never stop, and I'd rather make decisions on how to minimize it slowly and with lots of debate; if we act with haste to 'eradicate' suffering, we just perpetuate it out of short sighted passion. I believe that its more important to compromise on suffering than blindly strike in an ineffectual and backlash-inducing way that simply garauntees that more of it will occurr.
I think you're generalizing, as is the poster. Any language that enhances some level of procedual comfort and focuses on math is good.
My biggest complaint about most programmers that I've worked for is that they're so about the language and not enough about the actual math/calc and the inherent strengths and weaknesses of a given approach to design.
If anything, my suggestion would be any language, but make sure you're teaching them programming and math, not "this is BASIC" or "this is LOGO". Anything you can do to de-stress any real commitment to a syntax, language type, and API is going to impart far more important values. Teach them what a hammer is, but make sure they know that not everything in programming is a nail.