there are alternative distributions of realplayer and quicktime that play in the good old mediaplayer classic perfectly fine - just get the codecs and ignore their spyware wrappers (players) completely.
he's using media center pc - he's succumbed to the drm nazi's already and is obviously a lost cause.
the consumer public will boycott and simply ignore anything that forces DRM onto people like this, particularly if it offers very little to no benefits and costs more money.
this is the first thing i thought when i read this...perhaps they're going to syndicate & broadcast strangerhood on tv? that would almost make sense, because it's actually a story with characters n whatnot - and then we wouldn't have to be forced to endure live actors attempting to simulate the wooden horrid acting you see in most video games...
even if they just included the keyboard shortcuts to open the various 'other' programs in the suite, so you could replace the browser with firefox and then still be able to hit 'ctrl-1' to open the browser from any other program in the suite.
basically i should be able to install the 'mozilla suite' and choose if i want the default mozilla browser or firefox for my browser, or whether you want the default mozilla mail or thunderbird for email applications and so on.
and still have the same ctrl-1 for browser, ctrl-2 for email etc.
let alone the fact that even if you have your browser default set to firefox and you are using mozilla mail to read email, if you click a link in an email it will open up the mozilla browser instead of firefox no matter what you do.
it's little things like this that need to be streamlined - the 'suite' is just what people should get if they download the entire package, otherwise they get individual applications.
they should still be integrated by default even if installed seperately.
if you hit 'ctrl-2' for mail from firefox and don't have mozilla mail or thunderbird installed then by all means open the default mail application - just because microsoft applications don't play nice with other programs doesn't mean that mozilla can't.
how does the fact that the government developed it suddenly make it 'public domain'?
the government develops millions of dollars in software a year and doesn't feel the need to release the code under ANY license, let alone public domain
You can't 'borrow' from the GPL btw, you either use GPL code in-house (legally) or you use GPL code and release that code along with your public releases. it's either one or the other.
either way, if the project 'borrowed' GPL code, no matter how much 'public funds' were directed into the project, the original code is still GPL and 100% enforceable as such. You can't make code public domain that was previously GPL without the specific permission of the original authors - and a complete re-release of the code under the new license.
and this helps newbies that can't figure out anything but dreamweaver templates how?
perl is the most complicated language for newbies to learn that i've ever found - most dreamweaver newbs will have a hard enough time figuring out php, let alone perl
endless 500 server errors - yeah real 'user friendly';p
maybe a year or two ago, but the canadian dollar will be worth more than the US Dollar if things continue the way they have been as of late.
most canadian online businesses are already looking to switch their billing companies to ones that support 'anything but the USD' because the conversion (or lack thereof) is killing us.
we used to get almost $1.50 CDN for every USD about a year ago, now it's almost 1:1...ridiculous.
the US economy is in the toilet and just getting worse by the day.
Parents can say that they don't want the state to parent, but then the parents should be the ones out cleaning the ditches and being subjected to whatever fines or criminal penalties that their kids are liable for - otherwise the parents obviously DO want the state to parent, because they have reliquished their parental authority to the state.
Whatever happened to good old beatings? Taught me good;}
this is the #1 reason that p2p clients should be open-source - every other p2p client that ISN'T open source insists on bundling who knows what other spyware and other malware into the application.
i mean, look what kazaa turned into - a spyware ridden piece of crap - you take a brand-new install of windows, install kazaa - voila a spyware ridden box that has the network connection being sucked up by the endless spyware on the machine.
no thank you.
has nothing to do with being a zealot (which may be the case as well) but more with just knowing that there will be alternatives to whatever commercialized crap version that the big companies decide to release.
Seems that most people can't get beyond the fact that Open Source means a LOT more than just the Operating System.
The entire software stack does NOT need to be open source for it to be a 'win' for open source software. The more people that become educated about and begin to enjoy the benefits of Open Source, the more likely they will be to be willing to experiment and potentially migrate entirely onto open source software platforms.
My company for example, develops open source software (and has for many years) - the catch is that our current version is windows-specific...for most of our users, our engine is their FIRST experience with Open Source software PERIOD - most have no idea what open source is, what the benefits of OSS are, and so on.
After getting familiar with our product, many of our users have migrated alot of their software pipeline and tools into open source software - which is a win for ALL open source projects.
the GNU/Linux community often comes across as so elitist (at least in the mainstream view) that this kind of argument will HURT open source more than it will help.
By telling people that their efforts are useless or a waste of time simply turns people off of Open Source in general - and does not do the OSS movement as a whole any benefit.
exactly - this whole 'eating your own dogfood' idea is fine and dandy, but completely unrealistic in the real-world of IT.
You can also understand why MS products all require 15 other MS products to really work properly - if you buy one you find out you actually need licenses for a ton of other crap that otherwise you'd be able to do with out - and suddenly your IT server bank becomes a monstrosity with all of the servers that they expect you to run (back orifice type)...
Running MS servers when you aren't paying for them might be nice, but when you rack up the license fees, upgrade fees, 'per-processor' fees etc microsoft software just does not add up.
we can run our entire IT network off of a 300 mhz pentium running bsd...zero licensing costs, zero 'maintenance' costs - it just works.
it's pretty easy to see why microsoft completely misses the SMB market
Doom 3's use of Flash for menu's and in-game interaction panels was well done, although it was pretty obviously flash - almost too clean...
Could be used for all kinds of things, and there are many programs that will 'create' swf movies aside from 'flash' itself...
There are more programs these days that will 'write' pdf files, which is nice (open office in particular) that has made me personally start using pdf's more than previously but still acrobat itself is definitely a less than desirable piece of software...if you disable most of the plugins it is almost endurable;}
>>But flash is kind of unique today, it's one of the >>last commonly used formats where one company have >>monopoly on the players/viewers. That, to me, is >>enough reason to avoid it as much as possible.
you hit the nail right on the head there...
reason enough to avoid it as a development platform, no matter how powerful.
the memo said that EA was 'considering' changing policies which dictate which employees get overtime or not.
basically the memo was a 'stopgap' put out by the management to try and stop the obvious discontent that comes with having the entire world laugh at your company...let alone the internal discontent that the EA drones themselves must be feeling - those that are smart enough to care...
In other words, EA management are 'considering' changing the rules...which you can read to mean that they are waiting to see how long this discontent lasts.
In a few months if things just 'go away', then you can guess that there won't be any changes to their hiring and employment practices.
quake is unusable for commercial productions - iD still requires commercial licenses for the engine for anything serious done with their code.
with that said, I'm not sure if the commercial licenses apply to machinima now that i think about it - since you aren't technically distributing the engine code, just 'using it' to render the movies...
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there are alternative distributions of realplayer and quicktime that play in the good old mediaplayer classic perfectly fine - just get the codecs and ignore their spyware wrappers (players) completely.
he's using media center pc - he's succumbed to the drm nazi's already and is obviously a lost cause.
the consumer public will boycott and simply ignore anything that forces DRM onto people like this, particularly if it offers very little to no benefits and costs more money.
this is the first thing i thought when i read this...perhaps they're going to syndicate & broadcast strangerhood on tv? that would almost make sense, because it's actually a story with characters n whatnot - and then we wouldn't have to be forced to endure live actors attempting to simulate the wooden horrid acting you see in most video games...
very strange...
even if they just included the keyboard shortcuts to open the various 'other' programs in the suite, so you could replace the browser with firefox and then still be able to hit 'ctrl-1' to open the browser from any other program in the suite.
basically i should be able to install the 'mozilla suite' and choose if i want the default mozilla browser or firefox for my browser, or whether you want the default mozilla mail or thunderbird for email applications and so on.
and still have the same ctrl-1 for browser, ctrl-2 for email etc.
let alone the fact that even if you have your browser default set to firefox and you are using mozilla mail to read email, if you click a link in an email it will open up the mozilla browser instead of firefox no matter what you do.
it's little things like this that need to be streamlined - the 'suite' is just what people should get if they download the entire package, otherwise they get individual applications.
they should still be integrated by default even if installed seperately.
if you hit 'ctrl-2' for mail from firefox and don't have mozilla mail or thunderbird installed then by all means open the default mail application - just because microsoft applications don't play nice with other programs doesn't mean that mozilla can't.
is this not what happened with blender?
how does the fact that the government developed it suddenly make it 'public domain'?
the government develops millions of dollars in software a year and doesn't feel the need to release the code under ANY license, let alone public domain
You can't 'borrow' from the GPL btw, you either use GPL code in-house (legally) or you use GPL code and release that code along with your public releases. it's either one or the other.
either way, if the project 'borrowed' GPL code, no matter how much 'public funds' were directed into the project, the original code is still GPL and 100% enforceable as such. You can't make code public domain that was previously GPL without the specific permission of the original authors - and a complete re-release of the code under the new license.
and this helps newbies that can't figure out anything but dreamweaver templates how?
;p
perl is the most complicated language for newbies to learn that i've ever found - most dreamweaver newbs will have a hard enough time figuring out php, let alone perl
endless 500 server errors - yeah real 'user friendly'
not fukin likely.
maybe a year or two ago, but the canadian dollar will be worth more than the US Dollar if things continue the way they have been as of late.
most canadian online businesses are already looking to switch their billing companies to ones that support 'anything but the USD' because the conversion (or lack thereof) is killing us.
we used to get almost $1.50 CDN for every USD about a year ago, now it's almost 1:1...ridiculous.
the US economy is in the toilet and just getting worse by the day.
don't you mean the 'intarwebs'? all 4 or 5 of them...i lost count how many gwb claims to have invented now...
you suggesting that Kazaa has 'quality' programming?
either way if it's got adware built into it, it ain't goin anywhere near any desktops or servers we run...no matter how 'cool' it is
Parents can say that they don't want the state to parent, but then the parents should be the ones out cleaning the ditches and being subjected to whatever fines or criminal penalties that their kids are liable for - otherwise the parents obviously DO want the state to parent, because they have reliquished their parental authority to the state.
;}
Whatever happened to good old beatings? Taught me good
>>they're easy enough to "install" that a lot of
>>clueless system administrators install it without >>knowing how to use it.
This is pretty much the situation at any 'windows-centric' company i've come in contact with - they use windows products for 2 reasons:
1) the company is too cheap to hire a knowledgeable sysadmin that knows how to admin and setup other alternatives
2) company does whatever the sysadmin says - ie i learned windows at my 10 week sysadmin course so we have to use windows
--------
Of course the fact that microsoft blatantly pays the schools to teach microsoft-only topics doesn't even get considered in the equation.
And of course their anti-trust 'penalty' is providing millions of dollars of software to schools to help perpetuate this cycle even further.
Microsoft 'solutions' are brainless ones, sure, but is this not the core of the problem?
which is exactly why apple was screaming bloody murder when they proposed this as the remedy for their anti-trust violations.
absolutely ridiculous that they can use this situation to FURTHER their monopoly - and in one area that is already bad enough.
sickened indeed
gotta hate that
this is the #1 reason that p2p clients should be open-source - every other p2p client that ISN'T open source insists on bundling who knows what other spyware and other malware into the application.
i mean, look what kazaa turned into - a spyware ridden piece of crap - you take a brand-new install of windows, install kazaa - voila a spyware ridden box that has the network connection being sucked up by the endless spyware on the machine.
no thank you.
has nothing to do with being a zealot (which may be the case as well) but more with just knowing that there will be alternatives to whatever commercialized crap version that the big companies decide to release.
the founders of valve are ex-microsofties, they made their millions that started valve from microsoft - why wouldn't they be 'in bed' with microsoft?
Seems that most people can't get beyond the fact that Open Source means a LOT more than just the Operating System.
The entire software stack does NOT need to be open source for it to be a 'win' for open source software. The more people that become educated about and begin to enjoy the benefits of Open Source, the more likely they will be to be willing to experiment and potentially migrate entirely onto open source software platforms.
My company for example, develops open source software (and has for many years) - the catch is that our current version is windows-specific...for most of our users, our engine is their FIRST experience with Open Source software PERIOD - most have no idea what open source is, what the benefits of OSS are, and so on.
After getting familiar with our product, many of our users have migrated alot of their software pipeline and tools into open source software - which is a win for ALL open source projects.
the GNU/Linux community often comes across as so elitist (at least in the mainstream view) that this kind of argument will HURT open source more than it will help.
By telling people that their efforts are useless or a waste of time simply turns people off of Open Source in general - and does not do the OSS movement as a whole any benefit.
exactly - this whole 'eating your own dogfood' idea is fine and dandy, but completely unrealistic in the real-world of IT.
...
You can also understand why MS products all require 15 other MS products to really work properly - if you buy one you find out you actually need licenses for a ton of other crap that otherwise you'd be able to do with out - and suddenly your IT server bank becomes a monstrosity with all of the servers that they expect you to run (back orifice type)
Running MS servers when you aren't paying for them might be nice, but when you rack up the license fees, upgrade fees, 'per-processor' fees etc microsoft software just does not add up.
we can run our entire IT network off of a 300 mhz pentium running bsd...zero licensing costs, zero 'maintenance' costs - it just works.
it's pretty easy to see why microsoft completely misses the SMB market
Doom 3's use of Flash for menu's and in-game interaction panels was well done, although it was pretty obviously flash - almost too clean...
;}
Could be used for all kinds of things, and there are many programs that will 'create' swf movies aside from 'flash' itself...
There are more programs these days that will 'write' pdf files, which is nice (open office in particular) that has made me personally start using pdf's more than previously but still acrobat itself is definitely a less than desirable piece of software...if you disable most of the plugins it is almost endurable
>>But flash is kind of unique today, it's one of the
>>last commonly used formats where one company have
>>monopoly on the players/viewers. That, to me, is
>>enough reason to avoid it as much as possible.
you hit the nail right on the head there...
reason enough to avoid it as a development platform, no matter how powerful.
the memo said that EA was 'considering' changing policies which dictate which employees get overtime or not.
basically the memo was a 'stopgap' put out by the management to try and stop the obvious discontent that comes with having the entire world laugh at your company...let alone the internal discontent that the EA drones themselves must be feeling - those that are smart enough to care...
In other words, EA management are 'considering' changing the rules...which you can read to mean that they are waiting to see how long this discontent lasts.
In a few months if things just 'go away', then you can guess that there won't be any changes to their hiring and employment practices.
of course everyone that i know that was raised by an opinionated, 'cause-bearing' parent ends up being completely the exact opposite.
Ie, raised by Hippies, kid turns into an anarchist punk
raised by religious freaks, kid turns into a left-wing commie nutball
raised by sheltered paranoid parents, the kid is usually a wild-eyed freak
of course at least until we start doing gene-filtering and some of the other fun stuff that the NeoCons and their ilk have planned.
quake is unusable for commercial productions - iD still requires commercial licenses for the engine for anything serious done with their code.
with that said, I'm not sure if the commercial licenses apply to machinima now that i think about it - since you aren't technically distributing the engine code, just 'using it' to render the movies...
any game developer worth his salt knows that mountain dew is the drink of choice.
hence the thousands of freebies that they give out at E3 every year...
mmmm....colored sugar water...mmmm...
http://www.realityfactory.ca
Reality Factory is the ONLY freely available open-source engine that is capable of producing quality machinima.
Anything you see in Deus Ex or Max Payne is possible in RF, plus you get the entire source code.
Come join the community & contribute to an engine that benefits us ALL not a single proprietary corporation.