Actually if you look most companies have fairly strict rules on the use of their logo. I think its partly because when people see a logo they automatically assume the company officially has something to do with whatever is displaying it. If I ran a trade show and plastered IBM's logo everywhere, even though they did not sponsor it, and then put on a crappy show, people will blame IBM.
I have to agree having just started using QNX myself. One interesting feature it has is that it can run a TCP/IP stack remotely for real lightweight devices. So say your light switch would use your main computer which would be running the actual TCP/IP stack software, saving space and power on the tiny device switch. QNX's built in message passing system is very lightweight so you would actually save some resources over just embedding the tcp/ip stack withing the switch.
I have to agree. I've come across more then one fan news site that has had cases of petty bickering flame up totally throwing off any professionalism there was. Even online most of the news I read comes right from cnn.com, not from some "new media" website.
What I do agree with though is the old media is ran by a lot of older white guys, who censor things as they see fit. For a good book that talks and shows how some of this happens look up Adventures in TV Nation by Michael Moore.
"Really? I think you are grossly mistaken here. We see more and more games companies going bust or cutting down in size. I think those companies really underestimate the word of mouth marketing of games titles."
I know word of mouth can be a powerful marketing mechinism, but even if I really love a game I'll have a hard time convincing most people I know to buy one if its text based, or has really crappy graphics. Everyone I know who is just a game player, and not nescessarily into computers otherwise, wants to see nice things on the screen.
"Now that's about it. There is NOTHING else in shops (at least here in the UK)."
Well I've also seen sports games, RTSs, strategdy games, there's more then 4 basic types that are cloned.
"In the nineties we witnessed a spectacular collapse of quality in the games industry with Civ being possibly the single exception."
I wouldn't say so, take a look at Warcraft 2, Starcraft, SimCity, Master's of Orion, Star Control 2, Half Life, Asheron's Call, to name a few. These have all been very cool games, totally drawing me into their gameplay, with the addition of having nice graphics and sound even. There is a lot of crap clones out there, but there's hardly been a collapse of good games.
"The engine should be open source, and the part that makes it the specific game that it is, the artistic components, stay the part that makes the money."
So would you consider say game specific code, like for the AI of a end boss, or something similar should be closed as well as part that makes money? That way I'd see it being a more equal setting between artist/programmer.
"Clearly, YMMV--I'm not saying everyone is like me. But I exist (and I know I'm not the only one). Why is this market not being exploited? Make some good fun games that cost half as much (fire the art staff) as the art-filled wonders that crowd the shelves."
Well I agree with you that the gameplay is way more important then the art, unfortuantly fancy graphics sells. People like seeing pretty pictures a la Myst. I just bet there isn't enough of a market to sell art free games anymore, let alone try to convince someone to give you shelf space for it.
"So, the programming parts (the graphics engine) is open source and the artistic part (the game files, wad files, hog files, whatever your game calls them-files) is distributed as the game. It's the perfect compromise."
Well it is a nice model what about for the programmer who needs art? I might like to write a game (open source or closed) but the biggest problem I face is drawing stick people is the limit of my art ability. If you really wanted to have the game open, have all the code, and art avialable for reuse, and just have things like the levels, story, as what you're selling.
What you described above has the coders giving their work out for free, while the artists get to keep theirs.
"For once, I hope the RIAA wins, this doesn't help us at all, and just makes those of us who are after more than the latest MP3 bad."
Well I agree with you that what MP3Board.com is doing is probably not morally right (depends if you view trading copyrighted songs as right or wrong). But if the RIAA wins it brings up disturbing questions. What if my site links to yours, and you change yours at some point to put up illegal material? Am I know liable? How easy is it to draw the line between willingly linking to illegal material and accidently doing so.
Your search is given a unique ID which is used to route the search results back over the gnutella network. They don't come back directly from the server that is replying to the search. So in theory from how i understand it, only the node which sends you the search result would know you had searched for it.
From what I've studied of the protocol when you send out a search for a file on gnutella, that is anonymous and cannot be traced back to you.
But when you actually establish a connection to download a file, that is done peer to peer, so the person serving the file to you, would be able to get your IP address.
"And as this crosses national lines, not just state/province lines, how can the EU hope to enforce this."
For items, like software, directly sent over the net I'm not sure how they could do this, but for physical items shipped to the EU its easy to enforce. Everything sent into the country must pass through customs (at least in Canada it does) so they can verify items at that point. You won't catch it all but you should be able to catch a lot.
The article said its the first movie sent over the internet to a theater to be shown. Not that it was the first shown digitally and its definatly not going to be the first exclusively digital movie.
"Where is here? What is the name of the paper? Do they have a website that we can go to and search for this story? "
Its Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. You can try to find it at www.winnipegfreepress.com but this might have been before their online site really came up, and I'm unsure of how much they have archived.
"heh, that was too easy... Did you just respond to abuse with abuse?! Gad! You hypocrite! "
Well interesting way to make a point but I do see it. Though responding to posts on slashdot and defaming webpages are slightly different.
"We should be finding out why he was this pissed off and punished the people responsible before they push the kid over the edge. Not everyone can find a way to control their anger and focus it. This kid opened fire with a website, not a machine gun. I think should be encouraged. "
I agree with this fully, the source of why it was happening should be found and stopped. There's no reason why it ever should happen. But saying we should encourage him for writing a possibly illegal website is wrong. Yes its better then taking a machine gun to school, but its still not acceptable, in my opinion at least.
Or at least if he does put up a website, just don't call people names, say they're drunks, sluts etc. It would be more constructive to his cause if he wrote it explaining his situation saying what's been said of him, and by who. Calling someone back and saying they're a drunk or a slut won't help your cause, and like in this case can come back to bite you.
A while back the paper here reported about the exact same thing happening to someone. The response the ISP said was the same, we're cutting you off we can't deal with the DOS attack, and you're hurting our other customers.
Its a real bad attitude by ISPs and I would definatly think about it if I ever needed a commercial link in the city because who knows if you're the next target of a DOS attack and suddenly without access.
"So you recommend taking the abuse quietly, dealing with it in some quiet, non intrusive manner, and allowing people to keep piling shit on you while you deal with it all nice and neatly by some mechanism which doesn't inconvenience anyone. Well, Fuck you"
Well fuck you too budy. That's not what I recommend, there's lot that I would recommend but it seems your pent up anger prevents you from even having a civil discussion with someone you don't even know on slashdot. So calm down and when you can talk without every second sentence telling me to fuck myself we can discuss it.
"He also complimented some of the teachers he thought deserved it, AND he claims he can prove all of his accusations."
Hey if this is true then all the power to him. If he can prove his accusations and is ever charges (and hopefully found innocent of) libel he's set for the countersuit.
"He vented on the web. What's wrong with that?"
Lots. If I go slandering people on the web, espically in a small town, what if people start believing what I say. And what if thats wrong. You could destroy someone's life. I know that what people were doing to him could be argued destroying his, but why take down another person with you.
"Are we going to take away all mechanisms for dealing with stress that people have and let them explode and commit suicide or mass homicide? "
Ranting on the web is hardly the only way of dealing with stress. There's so much more to do, workout, play a game, ride your bike, etc. You don't have to get even to relieve stress. If his friend was attacked in the newspaper write a followup article to it. In our university paper friends of mine were involved in a similar situation (probably liberlous as well) and simply wrote back replies which were published.
Yup I totally agree with you. The problem in the article is he tries to draw a parallel between what happened to this kid and offensive speech. If this kids website was simply swears, and other similar things repeatly with no reference to anyone, then while offensive its not libel. When I start calling people names and saying things about them in a delibrate attempt to cause harm, that's libel.
I don't agree with him being bugged in school, and there's a lot of cases where nothing is done about that, but responding by posting a web site like this is not the way to deal with it.
A friend of mine recently was wondering something similar. He's working on an RPG and was thinking of releasing it online, but as I was telling him there's little way of preventing it to spread once its out there.
One possible idea is to have a donation form on your website. Tell people the book is free but if you like it please give me what you feel its worth so I can produce more in the future. I'd be interested to know how many people, and how much would be donated.
Though currently paper books are still huge, and will be for a long time still, you might be able to release in both formats and still make enough from the paper copies to not really care if a small amount of people (relative to anyone who can get paper books) are copying it around online.
So if someone breaks into my house and I notice it, is it alright for me to leave at the same time and go to their house to rob it? If a scam artist rips of my grandma is it alright if I call his grandma and rip her off?
An automated defense system that attacks back is walking a very fine line. Just because someone does it to you, definatly does not make it legal to do it back.
Though it is interesting to consider what "reasonable force" might consistute. Just as if someone physically attacks you, you can respond with enough force to stop them.
But as the article was warning if the person is faking their IP the analogy would be like being attacked on the street and beating up some 3rd guy for it. You're going to get in a lot of trouble for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually if you look most companies have fairly strict rules on the use of their logo. I think its partly because when people see a logo they automatically assume the company officially has something to do with whatever is displaying it. If I ran a trade show and plastered IBM's logo everywhere, even though they did not sponsor it, and then put on a crappy show, people will blame IBM.
I have to agree having just started using QNX myself. One interesting feature it has is that it can run a TCP/IP stack remotely for real lightweight devices. So say your light switch would use your main computer which would be running the actual TCP/IP stack software, saving space and power on the tiny device switch. QNX's built in message passing system is very lightweight so you would actually save some resources over just embedding the tcp/ip stack withing the switch.
It was designed to be a trilogy from what I've heard. All the main actors signed three film contracts before this first film was even produced.
And after the success this one will be (based on the $57 million opening weekend) they will be doing the sequels.
I have to agree. I've come across more then one fan news site that has had cases of petty bickering flame up totally throwing off any professionalism there was. Even online most of the news I read comes right from cnn.com, not from some "new media" website.
What I do agree with though is the old media is ran by a lot of older white guys, who censor things as they see fit. For a good book that talks and shows how some of this happens look up Adventures in TV Nation by Michael Moore.
"Really? I think you are grossly mistaken here. We see more and more games companies going bust or cutting down in size. I think those companies really underestimate the word of mouth marketing of games titles."
I know word of mouth can be a powerful marketing mechinism, but even if I really love a game I'll have a hard time convincing most people I know to buy one if its text based, or has really crappy graphics. Everyone I know who is just a game player, and not nescessarily into computers otherwise, wants to see nice things on the screen.
"Now that's about it. There is NOTHING else in shops (at least here in the UK)."
Well I've also seen sports games, RTSs, strategdy games, there's more then 4 basic types that are cloned.
"In the nineties we witnessed a spectacular collapse of quality in the games industry with Civ being possibly the single exception."
I wouldn't say so, take a look at Warcraft 2, Starcraft, SimCity, Master's of Orion, Star Control 2, Half Life, Asheron's Call, to name a few. These have all been very cool games, totally drawing me into their gameplay, with the addition of having nice graphics and sound even. There is a lot of crap clones out there, but there's hardly been a collapse of good games.
"The engine should be open source, and the part that makes it the specific game that it is, the artistic components, stay the part that makes the money."
So would you consider say game specific code, like for the AI of a end boss, or something similar should be closed as well as part that makes money? That way I'd see it being a more equal setting between artist/programmer.
"Clearly, YMMV--I'm not saying everyone is like me. But I exist (and I know I'm not the only one). Why is this market not being exploited? Make some good fun games that cost half as much (fire the art staff) as the art-filled wonders that crowd the shelves."
Well I agree with you that the gameplay is way more important then the art, unfortuantly fancy graphics sells. People like seeing pretty pictures a la Myst. I just bet there isn't enough of a market to sell art free games anymore, let alone try to convince someone to give you shelf space for it.
"So, the programming parts (the graphics engine) is open source and the artistic part (the game files, wad files, hog files, whatever your game calls them-files) is distributed as the game. It's the perfect compromise."
Well it is a nice model what about for the programmer who needs art? I might like to write a game (open source or closed) but the biggest problem I face is drawing stick people is the limit of my art ability. If you really wanted to have the game open, have all the code, and art avialable for reuse, and just have things like the levels, story, as what you're selling.
What you described above has the coders giving their work out for free, while the artists get to keep theirs.
"For once, I hope the RIAA wins, this doesn't help us at all, and just makes those of us who are after more than the latest MP3 bad."
Well I agree with you that what MP3Board.com is doing is probably not morally right (depends if you view trading copyrighted songs as right or wrong). But if the RIAA wins it brings up disturbing questions. What if my site links to yours, and you change yours at some point to put up illegal material? Am I know liable? How easy is it to draw the line between willingly linking to illegal material and accidently doing so.
Your search is given a unique ID which is used to route the search results back over the gnutella network. They don't come back directly from the server that is replying to the search. So in theory from how i understand it, only the node which sends you the search result would know you had searched for it.
From what I've studied of the protocol when you send out a search for a file on gnutella, that is anonymous and cannot be traced back to you.
But when you actually establish a connection to download a file, that is done peer to peer, so the person serving the file to you, would be able to get your IP address.
"How are they hurting the industry now ?"
Blackmailing distrubition companies (like Dell/Gateway) into not distributing software like Netscape or else they'll be charges a fortune for windows.
Not opening their API to everyone so their other apps have an unfair advantage over any other company out there.
That a start?
Yeah to me that seems like a stupid thing to miss, and yes if that was the failure she should be entitled to compensation.
Unless the company doing the background check was found to be negligent in doing their job there's probably little hope in a lawsuit.
"And as this crosses national lines, not just state/province lines, how can the EU hope to enforce this."
For items, like software, directly sent over the net I'm not sure how they could do this, but for physical items shipped to the EU its easy to enforce. Everything sent into the country must pass through customs (at least in Canada it does) so they can verify items at that point. You won't catch it all but you should be able to catch a lot.
The article said its the first movie sent over the internet to a theater to be shown. Not that it was the first shown digitally and its definatly not going to be the first exclusively digital movie.
Its Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. You can try to find it at www.winnipegfreepress.com but this might have been before their online site really came up, and I'm unsure of how much they have archived.
"heh, that was too easy... Did you just respond to abuse with abuse?! Gad! You hypocrite! "
Well interesting way to make a point but I do see it. Though responding to posts on slashdot and defaming webpages are slightly different.
"We should be finding out why he was this pissed off and punished the people responsible before they push the kid over the edge. Not everyone can find a way to control their anger and focus it. This kid opened fire with a website, not a machine gun. I think should be encouraged. "
I agree with this fully, the source of why it was happening should be found and stopped. There's no reason why it ever should happen. But saying we should encourage him for writing a possibly illegal website is wrong. Yes its better then taking a machine gun to school, but its still not acceptable, in my opinion at least.
Or at least if he does put up a website, just don't call people names, say they're drunks, sluts etc. It would be more constructive to his cause if he wrote it explaining his situation saying what's been said of him, and by who. Calling someone back and saying they're a drunk or a slut won't help your cause, and like in this case can come back to bite you.
A while back the paper here reported about the exact same thing happening to someone. The response the ISP said was the same, we're cutting you off we can't deal with the DOS attack, and you're hurting our other customers.
Its a real bad attitude by ISPs and I would definatly think about it if I ever needed a commercial link in the city because who knows if you're the next target of a DOS attack and suddenly without access.
"So you recommend taking the abuse quietly, dealing with it in some quiet, non intrusive manner, and allowing people to keep piling shit on you while you deal with it all nice and neatly by some mechanism which doesn't inconvenience anyone.
Well, Fuck you"
Well fuck you too budy. That's not what I recommend, there's lot that I would recommend but it seems your pent up anger prevents you from even having a civil discussion with someone you don't even know on slashdot. So calm down and when you can talk without every second sentence telling me to fuck myself we can discuss it.
(waiting for the -1 flamebait)
"He also complimented some of the teachers he thought deserved it, AND he claims he can prove all of his accusations."
Hey if this is true then all the power to him. If he can prove his accusations and is ever charges (and hopefully found innocent of) libel he's set for the countersuit.
"He vented on the web. What's wrong with that?"
Lots. If I go slandering people on the web, espically in a small town, what if people start believing what I say. And what if thats wrong. You could destroy someone's life. I know that what people were doing to him could be argued destroying his, but why take down another person with you.
"Are we going to take away all mechanisms for dealing with stress that people have and let them explode and commit suicide or mass homicide? "
Ranting on the web is hardly the only way of dealing with stress. There's so much more to do, workout, play a game, ride your bike, etc. You don't have to get even to relieve stress. If his friend was attacked in the newspaper write a followup article to it. In our university paper friends of mine were involved in a similar situation (probably liberlous as well) and simply wrote back replies which were published.
Yup I totally agree with you. The problem in the article is he tries to draw a parallel between what happened to this kid and offensive speech. If this kids website was simply swears, and other similar things repeatly with no reference to anyone, then while offensive its not libel. When I start calling people names and saying things about them in a delibrate attempt to cause harm, that's libel.
I don't agree with him being bugged in school, and there's a lot of cases where nothing is done about that, but responding by posting a web site like this is not the way to deal with it.
A friend of mine recently was wondering something similar. He's working on an RPG and was thinking of releasing it online, but as I was telling him there's little way of preventing it to spread once its out there.
One possible idea is to have a donation form on your website. Tell people the book is free but if you like it please give me what you feel its worth so I can produce more in the future. I'd be interested to know how many people, and how much would be donated.
Though currently paper books are still huge, and will be for a long time still, you might be able to release in both formats and still make enough from the paper copies to not really care if a small amount of people (relative to anyone who can get paper books) are copying it around online.
Yes it is, but if someone breaks into my house and I just pull out a gun and shoot them, then I'm going to jail (at least in Canada).
Or worse yet if someone breaks into my house and I shoot someone else who I thought was the culprit but was innocent, then I'm defatinly in trouble.
So if someone breaks into my house and I notice it, is it alright for me to leave at the same time and go to their house to rob it? If a scam artist rips of my grandma is it alright if I call his grandma and rip her off?
An automated defense system that attacks back is walking a very fine line. Just because someone does it to you, definatly does not make it legal to do it back.
Though it is interesting to consider what "reasonable force" might consistute. Just as if someone physically attacks you, you can respond with enough force to stop them.
But as the article was warning if the person is faking their IP the analogy would be like being attacked on the street and beating up some 3rd guy for it. You're going to get in a lot of trouble for it.