half-serious and slightly OT, but I fear us finding life out there. If they're anything like us and can travel through space they'll probably say something like:
"They found us, time to launch the interstellar planet destroying device - they have WMD's... somewhere... and oil!"
Or alternatively, can we blame emacs for all the MS patent violations in the OSS comunity. Im sure MS has a patent somewhere that states:
"a method for inputting ASCII text via an input device for later storage onto long-term or short-term physical media". Notepad, an invention worthy of Albert E himself.
Maybe they even have one like "a method for controlling storage media, physical input devices, display terminals, pointing devices and misc peripheral equipment for human use", though im not sure MS would really be willing to claim they actually invented windows (you'd be embaressed if you did right?).
Consume 1 grain of salt for each word in the above as it was my bad attempt at humor;)
I've been a fedora user since it was redhat (and various others prio to that), and I decided to try ubuntu on my as-yet-unused laptop fedora install because someone i know wouldn't shutup about how functional it was. At the moment I use windows pretty much everywhere due to work and i've gotta say, ubuntu is very usable as a replacement (shockingly so in fact). The thought that entered my head was:
"Wow, this is like the best OS i've seen yet for curious windows users". Then I realised what I said and grabbed my fedora 7 disk out of the burner.
Seriously though, while it was a usable OS I had troubles "messing" with it like i would fedora. For eg, "init 3"... "why is X still running?" (which i did figure out) and "it installed gcc but no header files? how bizare..." But i guess thats just getting used to it, for now it'll stay. Now all we need is a competitive API to directX that games makers can use to easily port games to linux and we're really getting somewhere! I'd love to see a linux console that played games that i could also use on my desktop/laptop.
Quite often I find myself using fedora on the VT's rather than the GUI (call me a bluff old traditionalist), but Ubuntu actually made me feel like using X for something more than just firefox.
Personally I made 3 false-moves to svn from cvs before managing to actually move to svn for real.
Some months ago my svn repository died and thankfully i have backups.
Having said all that, i always felt SVN was a move in the wrong direction for the right reasons. Considering though that I use svn for only my own work (with only me coding in it), git kinda seems pointless for me (though in development with more than 2 people involved i cant certainly see where it would kick butt over svn). For me, i was thinking of getting rid of svn and putting my repo's onto an ext3cow fs!.
I find it a little odd actually that people cant see why per-coder branching with a merge model is a big win-win. To me this is like a big "WOW, we can do QA is a logical manner finally" (keep in mind, a merge can be another branch if i understand it correctly). Of course, I haven't really used git myself other than a quick play to see what its like.
On a side note, 2 companies I've worked with have black-listed SVN cause of its ability to be configured in an authentication mode involving plain-text. It didn't matter that no one there had planned on using that particular functionality, just that it even existed.
You should care to some degree considering who the people running around with lawyers suing practically anyone who owns an mp3 player (or perhaps even owns something that looks like white headphones might plug into it).
Not that it bothers me that much, but RIAA/MPAA have been going a little insane with their rather prolific and rediculous legal action.
You may not share music at all (and i dont), but you may share it with a friend who sticks it up on p2p or someone hacks into your computer nicks off with an mp3 or 2 and uploads it to p2p. Or perhaps your laptop is lost/stolen and your entire mp3 collection ends up on a p2p network and suddenly your responsible and identifiable. You'll probably get away with the last one but how much will it cost you to be cleared of any wrong doing?
Thats what I fear, I dont want to have to fork over the thousands its going to cost to defend myself from that kind of action personally.
Its interesting how technology has evolved over the last 20 years and this is a prime example... go back 15 years and high-end was truely high-end, desktop was very low-end and there was varying shades of grey all throughout the spectrum.
Those 2 ends of the spectrum still remain to a large extent, but the distance between them really has narrowed. Sure you can buy a huge multi-rack (possibly even custom designed) box if your a company and the raw grunt of it will slaughter your over pc. But, the architectual differences are nowhere near as huge as they were.
But parallel programming is by no means new, and in fact it was really big news 15 years ago on MPAR boxes. It was a highly specialised area and while MPAR boxes still do exist, the demand for the skill set has certainly all but disappeared... Well now its back again, possibly with a vengence. But when you look around, theres alot of parallel type paradigm's already in existence that can probably help the industry grow. Take (as an example out of thing air) stackless pythons model of (sort-of) blowing away the threading model and going with something they like to call tasklets and micro-threads. To me, this whole concept sounds rather antiquated much like the pre-smp-desktop era with its co-operative multi-tasking, but its a concept that is worth building on.
Personally i think perhaps they'll find a way of overcoming the whole "we cant make cpu's any faster anymore" thing with some new technological discovery. If they don't however, it really could spell a new era of computing in some ways. People might possibly start looking at CPU architecture with a new eye. Its been a while since we even had (real) arguments about RISC v CISC for example.
Imagine a completely new cpu design thats like nothing we've seen, but scales in some horizontal way thats transparent to programmers. Necessity is the mother of invention after all;)
What I really am interested in seeing is how something like that would develop? Microsoft have been traditionally very bad at dealing with architecture changes on those kinds of scales (think smp, 64bit, etc) and thats not to say linux, apple, Sun, BSD (or anyone else) would be able to adapt. But if there were a fundamental shift in the basis of computer design there stands a chance for someone to win a pretty big victory. Although I personally hope its not apple, apple seem great at farming a new technology and making it just a little expensive and forcing someone to come out with a cheaper (not just in cost) alternative (a good example of that was firewire vs USB, firewire should have won that battle if only apple just hadn't made it way too expensive to license).
But, i think by "necessity is the mother of invention" the end result is going to be something more like a shift in the way people code - perhaps a new language, new design principles, etc that lend them self to parallel programming. Perhaps even a method of virtualisation that solves the problem?
Whatever does happen, it'll be exciting to be along for the ride! (i hope).
If you have a separate agreement with the relevant copyright holders, you don't need to pay SoundExchange. If you are playing a recording to which you are the copyright holder, or a recording which is in the public domain, you don't need to pay SoundExchange. Ok, thats not too bad in that case... from reading the various articles about it all, it was sounding to me that any radio station playing any kind of music, under any type of license were forced to pay SE. Which to me sounds like EMC collecting a licensing fee for every piece of storage (and then passing that currency onto the real storage vendor if they ask for it) in the world based on the fact they are some licensing source storage (poor analogy i know, but hopefully that it makes some sence).
Having said that, the fees are insane tbh. Not that im about to run an internet radio station anytime soon..
Is the RIAA that powerful that they can manage to dictate legislation that way? Yes. The industries involved in copyright matters have been dictating legislation from the beginning of the 20th century on. This is nothing new. Yes, this is true I guess and to some extent justified. But certainly not to the extent that they have been given power now.
How does SoundExchange force people to pay royalties?
There was an article some time ago that ALL internet radio stations, regardless of content, had to pay SE on a per-song basis. I really don't understand how they have the power or the right to do something like that?
For example if I setup a radio station that played only freely-available, royalty-less music. How does SE get away with charging me money to play said music? Is the RIAA that powerful that they can manage to dictate legislation that way? have i missed something obvious?
What I would be curious to know is, if I wrote a computer program that generated random music (lets ignore the technical feasibility of that and assume its possible) and make a radio station that played that (and only that) could SE force me to pay them royalties? If that is the case, how is that even in the most bizarre parallel universe either fair or just?
Perhaps even a simpler argument was if i were an artist and ran an internet radio station solely playing my own music, can SE force me to pay them royalties? It just seems really stupid to me...
First, theres an article on slashdot yesterday about spyware that has been "approved" by truste and now vista comes with embedded spyware to tell MS (who are trying to break into advertising) where i am, what im looking at and what my name is?
The thing that worries me about all this is the rather lack-lustre response you'd expect from the general slashdot community about breaches of privacy, etc. Have the aliens invaded?
im scared... they only come out at night, mostly...
Seriously though for everything that sucks about vista atm (performance, etc), knowing it had embedded spyware (or what exactly is a "special cookie program"?) would stop me moving to it.
But i wonder if microsoft are using the binary M or the storage-vendor M?
40,000,000 v's 41,943,040.
To be totally honest, i hate microsoft with a passion but it would be nice to know some real facts and figures. I find it hard to believe 40mil is correct but I wouldn't be utterly surprised to find out it wasn't hugely inflated.
You know, when you look back at when 32bit cpu's hit the market and we had linux that was a real 32-bit protected mode OS with pre-emptive multitasking, compared to windows with its 16bit msdos based co-operative multitasking OS with those cursed win32s extensions. MS was unable to even produce think about SMP or a 32 bit OS and DEC built NT for them, competing with IBM's OS/2. It all reminds me of this from Star wars:
Darth Vader: I've been waiting for you, Obi-Wan. We meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When I met you I was but the learner. Now, *I* am the master. Obi-Wan: Only a master of evil, Darth.
Following the entirely logical series of events i predict that in future the following will happen: 1) Linus Torvalds will turn out to be Steve Balmer's son. 2) Bill Gates will turn out to the be incarnation of all that is evil 3) Steve Balmer and Linus will have some kind of battle in redmond involving high-voltage electricity. 4) Steve Balmer will kill Bill Gates by chucking him off the Seattle space needle (though, how they got there will remain a mystery) 5) Steve Balmer will die and his dying gift will be to give Linus a HD-DVD will all the source code to every windows product. 6) Sadly (or happily?) the world will never see the source code cause it'll be a sony blu-ray dvd with heavy drm protection.
To all those out there who defend MS and tell us how they've done such wonderfull things to the IT industry. Who sit there wondering why the rest of us (who typically have been around for a while) hate microsoft with something akin to a passion. Here's your answer why.
Personally i think the home server deal is probably going to become quite a reality. Lets face it your average joe with a home pc and an adsl link already has to do some form of management for themselves. If you assume they have other family members also using a shared pc then there's some more work to do there.
But, if some beast did become reality lets look at the reality of the technology its going to be storing mp3's, videos and all kinds of household rubbish. It also has to meanfully integrate with desktop pc's around it and be very simple to manage.
Now your average user can already plonk an adsl modem and a router + wireless on the network (altho, judging by the seriously large number of open wireless networks lying around its clear how little they bother to actually understand them). Now if i were to ask my upstairs neighbour (who has a wireless acces point, a router 2 laptops and desktop) what his ip address is, he wouldnt know what im talking about because his network hardware has a bunch of defaults he didnt need to bother with. Why would a home server be much different?
"oh, im running out of space, i'll have to delete some stuff"... But this is where the technology has to grow, the desktop pc has to be able to integrate easily but securely, the box itself should be easily upgradable for space (without destroying content, etc). Its not here yet but it cant really be that far away either.
Lets face facts, the technology is out there already to easily grow volumes on a running OS. All that needs to happen is for someone to plonk a simple management interface, a manual and easily plugable drives and viola - home server.
Obviously im over-simplifying but the technology isn't that far off for a reasonable home-server that could easily manage to: - hold a bunch of mp3's - hold a bunch of video - record some stuff - be upgradeable - integrate easily into an existing pc - put itself onto a network that already exists - etc.
Try to find the "hard" part in all that (the correct answer is when things go wrong;)).
I don't follow you here. Ore is mined from asteroids (players) refined into minerals (players) build into modules and ships (players) and finally sold on the open market (again, players). This is fully player controlled from start to finish. The only element that is not 100% PC is trading, but even that changes depending on supply & demand.
While you are correct, its the same for everyone (assuming equal skills that is). The amount of ore you can mine is fixed, the amount you can build is fixed and the blueprints are sold only by npc's. The only factors involved in the end cost is (what im trying to get at is that if you can build it, i can build it exactly the same which is not necessarily true in SWG even when all else is equal):
1) what other people are going to charge for it (and for t1 stuff it just gets driven down to minimal profit anyway)
2) the cost of the bpc.
Theres alot more to it than that, but in general the price of an item really does come back to npc's one way or another and if ya look around theres alot of impact the npc's have on controlling the prices of (especially t1) goods. There is quite a high reliance on NPC trade goods as well (whose prices are set by the npc's who sell them). But we're now officially OT.
I disagree, the problems facing SWG weren't really about its setting in time as it were, and if you disconnect from the movies to some extent it still is a believable mmo but it suffers so many game-play problems... (keeping in mind i've played it since about 3 months after the release of JTL) for eg:
1) pvp - the pvp in this game was so badly thought out compared to just about ANY mmo out there (DAoC, WoW, EVE, etc) 2) towns and building - great idea but very terribly implemented (take a look at the boundaries around the major cities), they really should have done something alot better when it came to people being able to plonk buildings down everywhere. 3) Jedi - the hologrind sucked... the new system sucked... and in between we couldn't actually become jedi for like 6 months (what the hell were they thinking?!?!?), one of the stupidest moves in a game full of bad moves made by SOE. 4) JTL - something we were promised from the start and was made a paid-for expansion (and i really despise how MMO's can charge for an expansion when you already pay a monthly fee - this is one thing EVE got very right). DAoC is another example of this, sure they have development costs but those dev's are there full time anyway, which means your $15/mon (or whatever) is already paying their incomes. What was really painfull about this was when people didn't buy the expansions... 'nuff said. 5) Nerfing - everytime you turned around something was nerfed, sure you needed balance but you can hardly shoot for balance when SWG just kept changing everything all the time, there was just never any time to see if this balance was finally right.
What they got right: 1) the economy - Bar none THE BEST implementation of a player-owned economy. Eve likes to think its market is played controlled but thats really not true in any sense of the word. Everything in Eve comes back to NPC prices one way or another, sure t2 is mostly player controlled but even the base price of those items is set back towards what the npc related things are going to cost (even if the high-price is sometimes upwards of 100 or 1000 times its actual build cost). 2) the wide variety of professions (well thought out and the inter-dependence was quite well done) until JTL, what JTL did to the profession tree's was really quite painfull. 3) generally speaking, the concepts introduced in the game were fantastic ideas and if it wasn't implemented by SOE it probably would have worked. It was a very big shame SOE got the contract for it because they just had no idea at all... If you went back to the start and got another company to implement swg and made some minor changes to things like pvp and so forth it probably would have been up there with WoW.
Lucas arts were never particularly smart about the way they went about alot of the things they did, but oh well.
Given last weeks article about how ms want people to pirate their products and that they do it so that people would eventually turn to the "legal" route, does anyone believe this was found by "accident"?
seriously, hasn't this always been the way? give people a way to run MS's products pirated? maybe im just an old cynic..
I'm just blown away by this. Goes to show you how ridiculous things really are in the world. your average joe on the street who knows jack-crap about what MS has done and continuous to do the software industry see's a wonderfull company where the rest of us see an "evil" empire.
Reminds me of the scene in star wars 3 where Amidala says "so this is how democracy dies, to thunderous applause". Things like this just make me lose total faith in the world.
I think i might start up a business dedicated to destroying organizations like the world wildlife fund, greenpeace, the salvation army etc. Then i'll build it into a massive empire so i can keep half of everything i take from them and later give it away to the people who needed it in the first place. Should earn me a nobel prize or 2 if i can engineer it as well is Bill has. Of course, if any of you start up a business that looks like it might compete, im going to squash you out of existence which wont make any difference because by the time im done i'll have enough wealth to control everything people read or see so only people who look hard enough would have a clue as to how truly despicable i really am.
I wonder then if XM had sold two devices 1) a digital radio for the streaming broadcast and 2) a digital recording device with no relationship between the two and no dedicated interface to hook the two together, would they have been protected.
It seems straight forward no, unless XM started selling the two as a bundle, then you start going around in circles thinking "oh god my head hurts".
It seems like Lindor actually came out on top, even though her complaint was rejected. Oh so very confused. If i read it correctly it seems Lindor's lawyers wanted the wording of some document changed that said that "just having a shared files folder wasn't enough" to be illegal, that failed, but the judge still went with the "you must prove she actually shared copyrighted material" anyway.
One thing that got me the first time i played a character in NWN2 was the feeling the game was quite linear. I then went back and started a new char and realised how wrong I was. The game seems quite seemless if you play a character a certain way (good/evil/etc), and so you look back and think "well all i did was really what the story told me to do". But slight changes along the way seem to change the story you follow quite drastically. Originally it didnt feel like there was much of the npc-giving-little-quests-here-and-there until i'd tried it a couple of times and thought "hey last time this happened".
Generally speaking im a little dissapointed in nwn 2, thought it could have been a fair bit better and the manual for the game (if you didnt play nwn 2 (plus the expansions) is very very bad. A lot of people would be sittting there going "so i craft how?" cause the manual sticks the entire "crafting" experience into one paragraph that basically says "crafting in nwn 2 hasnt changed since nwn 1" (i had to go back to my nwn sou and hotu to remember how to do things not explained in the manual). Which made me wonder if they figured that the only people buying nwn 2 would be those who already had nwn 1 (and also shelled out for the expansions).
Even more frustrating is the fact the manual goes into rediculous depths in other areas where its just not required... very frustrating.
So, how many of you have NWN2 and not NWN1 (forgotten realms things its none of you)?
We hate music, we hate people having it and the world would be a better place without it.
Personally, im just getting to the point where I really dont care anymore... The RIAA are scum, MPAA are scum, and the IFPI well they're scum too.
All I care about is that I dont work for the RIAA. I dont know how those guy manage to sleep at night doing the things they do, i really just wouldn't be able to live with myself. Its quite sad when you try and put yourself in their shoe's and see it from their point of view.
The kind of lawsuits they've put against students, grand people and even the dead really says alot about how much they lack even the basic forms of being a human.
Im still trying to decide whether the novell/ms deal was a good thing, but I realy find it hard to believe hula got canned becuase of it.
Every second post seems to be a novell post and how "their descision to do x" is soley based on their new "partnership". If MS really are at the helm then im really not sure it matters alot, It makes suse look more attractive to corporates but there are plenty of options out there that dont involve selling your soul to the devil.
I remember a post a while ago about ways Microsoft could harm linux, i wish i could find the link but it talked about things like "encorage forking within linux" or words to that effect. It'll be interesting to see if just the mere smell of MS on Novell will be enough to create a scism that'll result in some form of forking here...
As I sit there coding some piece of rather innocent software blissfully unaware of the world around me, i wonder how many patents im infringing with every line of code....
This is quite seriously scary stuff in my opinion and just goes to emphasize how we really shouldnt have software patents in the first place. Sadly, im a big fan of big blue and dislike amazon quite alot.
I wonder how many people, who code just "stumble" on the same idea. If you locked a coder in a black box and told him write a site that sells things online and make it "feature" rich, how many patents would he infringe?
The broad nature of the patents (or at least how they are described in the article) makes me pray to god IBM dont win this one.
Slashdot Mirror
half-serious and slightly OT, but I fear us finding life out there. If they're anything like us and can travel through space they'll probably say something like:
"They found us, time to launch the interstellar planet destroying device - they have WMD's... somewhere... and oil!"
Plug into visual studio(c) like VIM does?
;)
Or alternatively, can we blame emacs for all the MS patent violations in the OSS comunity. Im sure MS has a patent somewhere that states:
"a method for inputting ASCII text via an input device for later storage onto long-term or short-term physical media". Notepad, an invention worthy of Albert E himself.
Maybe they even have one like "a method for controlling storage media, physical input devices, display terminals, pointing devices and misc peripheral equipment for human use", though im not sure MS would really be willing to claim they actually invented windows (you'd be embaressed if you did right?).
Consume 1 grain of salt for each word in the above as it was my bad attempt at humor
I've been a fedora user since it was redhat (and various others prio to that), and I decided to try ubuntu on my as-yet-unused laptop fedora install because someone i know wouldn't shutup about how functional it was. At the moment I use windows pretty much everywhere due to work and i've gotta say, ubuntu is very usable as a replacement (shockingly so in fact). The thought that entered my head was:
"Wow, this is like the best OS i've seen yet for curious windows users". Then I realised what I said and grabbed my fedora 7 disk out of the burner.
Seriously though, while it was a usable OS I had troubles "messing" with it like i would fedora. For eg, "init 3"... "why is X still running?" (which i did figure out) and "it installed gcc but no header files? how bizare..." But i guess thats just getting used to it, for now it'll stay. Now all we need is a competitive API to directX that games makers can use to easily port games to linux and we're really getting somewhere! I'd love to see a linux console that played games that i could also use on my desktop/laptop.
Quite often I find myself using fedora on the VT's rather than the GUI (call me a bluff old traditionalist), but Ubuntu actually made me feel like using X for something more than just firefox.
Personally I made 3 false-moves to svn from cvs before managing to actually move to svn for real.
Some months ago my svn repository died and thankfully i have backups.
Having said all that, i always felt SVN was a move in the wrong direction for the right reasons. Considering though that I use svn for only my own work (with only me coding in it), git kinda seems pointless for me (though in development with more than 2 people involved i cant certainly see where it would kick butt over svn). For me, i was thinking of getting rid of svn and putting my repo's onto an ext3cow fs!.
I find it a little odd actually that people cant see why per-coder branching with a merge model is a big win-win. To me this is like a big "WOW, we can do QA is a logical manner finally" (keep in mind, a merge can be another branch if i understand it correctly). Of course, I haven't really used git myself other than a quick play to see what its like.
On a side note, 2 companies I've worked with have black-listed SVN cause of its ability to be configured in an authentication mode involving plain-text. It didn't matter that no one there had planned on using that particular functionality, just that it even existed.
You should care to some degree considering who the people running around with lawyers suing practically anyone who owns an mp3 player (or perhaps even owns something that looks like white headphones might plug into it).
Not that it bothers me that much, but RIAA/MPAA have been going a little insane with their rather prolific and rediculous legal action.
You may not share music at all (and i dont), but you may share it with a friend who sticks it up on p2p or someone hacks into your computer nicks off with an mp3 or 2 and uploads it to p2p. Or perhaps your laptop is lost/stolen and your entire mp3 collection ends up on a p2p network and suddenly your responsible and identifiable. You'll probably get away with the last one but how much will it cost you to be cleared of any wrong doing?
Thats what I fear, I dont want to have to fork over the thousands its going to cost to defend myself from that kind of action personally.
Its interesting how technology has evolved over the last 20 years and this is a prime example... go back 15 years and high-end was truely high-end, desktop was very low-end and there was varying shades of grey all throughout the spectrum.
Those 2 ends of the spectrum still remain to a large extent, but the distance between them really has narrowed. Sure you can buy a huge multi-rack (possibly even custom designed) box if your a company and the raw grunt of it will slaughter your over pc. But, the architectual differences are nowhere near as huge as they were.
But parallel programming is by no means new, and in fact it was really big news 15 years ago on MPAR boxes. It was a highly specialised area and while MPAR boxes still do exist, the demand for the skill set has certainly all but disappeared... Well now its back again, possibly with a vengence. But when you look around, theres alot of parallel type paradigm's already in existence that can probably help the industry grow. Take (as an example out of thing air) stackless pythons model of (sort-of) blowing away the threading model and going with something they like to call tasklets and micro-threads. To me, this whole concept sounds rather antiquated much like the pre-smp-desktop era with its co-operative multi-tasking, but its a concept that is worth building on.
Personally i think perhaps they'll find a way of overcoming the whole "we cant make cpu's any faster anymore" thing with some new technological discovery. If they don't however, it really could spell a new era of computing in some ways. People might possibly start looking at CPU architecture with a new eye. Its been a while since we even had (real) arguments about RISC v CISC for example.
Imagine a completely new cpu design thats like nothing we've seen, but scales in some horizontal way thats transparent to programmers. Necessity is the mother of invention after all;)
What I really am interested in seeing is how something like that would develop? Microsoft have been traditionally very bad at dealing with architecture changes on those kinds of scales (think smp, 64bit, etc) and thats not to say linux, apple, Sun, BSD (or anyone else) would be able to adapt. But if there were a fundamental shift in the basis of computer design there stands a chance for someone to win a pretty big victory. Although I personally hope its not apple, apple seem great at farming a new technology and making it just a little expensive and forcing someone to come out with a cheaper (not just in cost) alternative (a good example of that was firewire vs USB, firewire should have won that battle if only apple just hadn't made it way too expensive to license).
But, i think by "necessity is the mother of invention" the end result is going to be something more like a shift in the way people code - perhaps a new language, new design principles, etc that lend them self to parallel programming. Perhaps even a method of virtualisation that solves the problem?
Whatever does happen, it'll be exciting to be along for the ride! (i hope).
Having said that, the fees are insane tbh. Not that im about to run an internet radio station anytime soon.. Is the RIAA that powerful that they can manage to dictate legislation that way? Yes. The industries involved in copyright matters have been dictating legislation from the beginning of the 20th century on. This is nothing new. Yes, this is true I guess and to some extent justified. But certainly not to the extent that they have been given power now.
Thanks for clearing that up!
How does SoundExchange force people to pay royalties?
There was an article some time ago that ALL internet radio stations, regardless of content, had to pay SE on a per-song basis. I really don't understand how they have the power or the right to do something like that?
For example if I setup a radio station that played only freely-available, royalty-less music. How does SE get away with charging me money to play said music? Is the RIAA that powerful that they can manage to dictate legislation that way? have i missed something obvious?
What I would be curious to know is, if I wrote a computer program that generated random music (lets ignore the technical feasibility of that and assume its possible) and make a radio station that played that (and only that) could SE force me to pay them royalties? If that is the case, how is that even in the most bizarre parallel universe either fair or just?
Perhaps even a simpler argument was if i were an artist and ran an internet radio station solely playing my own music, can SE force me to pay them royalties? It just seems really stupid to me...
First, theres an article on slashdot yesterday about spyware that has been "approved" by truste and now vista comes with embedded spyware to tell MS (who are trying to break into advertising) where i am, what im looking at and what my name is?
The thing that worries me about all this is the rather lack-lustre response you'd expect from the general slashdot community about breaches of privacy, etc. Have the aliens invaded?
im scared... they only come out at night, mostly...
Seriously though for everything that sucks about vista atm (performance, etc), knowing it had embedded spyware (or what exactly is a "special cookie program"?) would stop me moving to it.
But i wonder if microsoft are using the binary M or the storage-vendor M?
40,000,000 v's 41,943,040.
To be totally honest, i hate microsoft with a passion but it would be nice to know some real facts and figures. I find it hard to believe 40mil is correct but I wouldn't be utterly surprised to find out it wasn't hugely inflated.
You know, when you look back at when 32bit cpu's hit the market and we had linux that was a real 32-bit protected mode OS with pre-emptive multitasking, compared to windows with its 16bit msdos based co-operative multitasking OS with those cursed win32s extensions. MS was unable to even produce think about SMP or a 32 bit OS and DEC built NT for them, competing with IBM's OS/2. It all reminds me of this from Star wars:
Darth Vader: I've been waiting for you, Obi-Wan. We meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When I met you I was but the learner. Now, *I* am the master.
Obi-Wan: Only a master of evil, Darth.
Following the entirely logical series of events i predict that in future the following will happen:
1) Linus Torvalds will turn out to be Steve Balmer's son.
2) Bill Gates will turn out to the be incarnation of all that is evil
3) Steve Balmer and Linus will have some kind of battle in redmond involving high-voltage electricity.
4) Steve Balmer will kill Bill Gates by chucking him off the Seattle space needle (though, how they got there will remain a mystery)
5) Steve Balmer will die and his dying gift will be to give Linus a HD-DVD will all the source code to every windows product.
6) Sadly (or happily?) the world will never see the source code cause it'll be a sony blu-ray dvd with heavy drm protection.
I know, call me Nostradamus.
To all those out there who defend MS and tell us how they've done such wonderfull things to the IT industry. Who sit there wondering why the rest of us (who typically have been around for a while) hate microsoft with something akin to a passion. Here's your answer why.
Do you think we're suprised...
Personally i think the home server deal is probably going to become quite a reality. Lets face it your average joe with a home pc and an adsl link already has to do some form of management for themselves. If you assume they have other family members also using a shared pc then there's some more work to do there.
;)).
But, if some beast did become reality lets look at the reality of the technology its going to be storing mp3's, videos and all kinds of household rubbish. It also has to meanfully integrate with desktop pc's around it and be very simple to manage.
Now your average user can already plonk an adsl modem and a router + wireless on the network (altho, judging by the seriously large number of open wireless networks lying around its clear how little they bother to actually understand them). Now if i were to ask my upstairs neighbour (who has a wireless acces point, a router 2 laptops and desktop) what his ip address is, he wouldnt know what im talking about because his network hardware has a bunch of defaults he didnt need to bother with. Why would a home server be much different?
"oh, im running out of space, i'll have to delete some stuff"... But this is where the technology has to grow, the desktop pc has to be able to integrate easily but securely, the box itself should be easily upgradable for space (without destroying content, etc). Its not here yet but it cant really be that far away either.
Lets face facts, the technology is out there already to easily grow volumes on a running OS. All that needs to happen is for someone to plonk a simple management interface, a manual and easily plugable drives and viola - home server.
Obviously im over-simplifying but the technology isn't that far off for a reasonable home-server that could easily manage to:
- hold a bunch of mp3's
- hold a bunch of video
- record some stuff
- be upgradeable
- integrate easily into an existing pc
- put itself onto a network that already exists
- etc.
Try to find the "hard" part in all that (the correct answer is when things go wrong
While you are correct, its the same for everyone (assuming equal skills that is). The amount of ore you can mine is fixed, the amount you can build is fixed and the blueprints are sold only by npc's. The only factors involved in the end cost is (what im trying to get at is that if you can build it, i can build it exactly the same which is not necessarily true in SWG even when all else is equal):
1) what other people are going to charge for it (and for t1 stuff it just gets driven down to minimal profit anyway)
2) the cost of the bpc.
Theres alot more to it than that, but in general the price of an item really does come back to npc's one way or another and if ya look around theres alot of impact the npc's have on controlling the prices of (especially t1) goods. There is quite a high reliance on NPC trade goods as well (whose prices are set by the npc's who sell them). But we're now officially OT.
I disagree, the problems facing SWG weren't really about its setting in time as it were, and if you disconnect from the movies to some extent it still is a believable mmo but it suffers so many game-play problems... (keeping in mind i've played it since about 3 months after the release of JTL) for eg:
1) pvp - the pvp in this game was so badly thought out compared to just about ANY mmo out there (DAoC, WoW, EVE, etc)
2) towns and building - great idea but very terribly implemented (take a look at the boundaries around the major cities), they really should have done something alot better when it came to people being able to plonk buildings down everywhere.
3) Jedi - the hologrind sucked... the new system sucked... and in between we couldn't actually become jedi for like 6 months (what the hell were they thinking?!?!?), one of the stupidest moves in a game full of bad moves made by SOE.
4) JTL - something we were promised from the start and was made a paid-for expansion (and i really despise how MMO's can charge for an expansion when you already pay a monthly fee - this is one thing EVE got very right). DAoC is another example of this, sure they have development costs but those dev's are there full time anyway, which means your $15/mon (or whatever) is already paying their incomes. What was really painfull about this was when people didn't buy the expansions... 'nuff said.
5) Nerfing - everytime you turned around something was nerfed, sure you needed balance but you can hardly shoot for balance when SWG just kept changing everything all the time, there was just never any time to see if this balance was finally right.
What they got right:
1) the economy - Bar none THE BEST implementation of a player-owned economy. Eve likes to think its market is played controlled but thats really not true in any sense of the word. Everything in Eve comes back to NPC prices one way or another, sure t2 is mostly player controlled but even the base price of those items is set back towards what the npc related things are going to cost (even if the high-price is sometimes upwards of 100 or 1000 times its actual build cost).
2) the wide variety of professions (well thought out and the inter-dependence was quite well done) until JTL, what JTL did to the profession tree's was really quite painfull.
3) generally speaking, the concepts introduced in the game were fantastic ideas and if it wasn't implemented by SOE it probably would have worked. It was a very big shame SOE got the contract for it because they just had no idea at all... If you went back to the start and got another company to implement swg and made some minor changes to things like pvp and so forth it probably would have been up there with WoW.
Lucas arts were never particularly smart about the way they went about alot of the things they did, but oh well.
Thank god he's on linux's side. Truly a remarkable effort really.
something about the date makes me think it could actually be a whole lot worse ;)
Given last weeks article about how ms want people to pirate their products and that they do it so that people would eventually turn to the "legal" route, does anyone believe this was found by "accident"?
seriously, hasn't this always been the way? give people a way to run MS's products pirated? maybe im just an old cynic..
I'm just blown away by this. Goes to show you how ridiculous things really are in the world. your average joe on the street who knows jack-crap about what MS has done and continuous to do the software industry see's a wonderfull company where the rest of us see an "evil" empire.
Reminds me of the scene in star wars 3 where Amidala says "so this is how democracy dies, to thunderous applause". Things like this just make me lose total faith in the world.
I think i might start up a business dedicated to destroying organizations like the world wildlife fund, greenpeace, the salvation army etc. Then i'll build it into a massive empire so i can keep half of everything i take from them and later give it away to the people who needed it in the first place. Should earn me a nobel prize or 2 if i can engineer it as well is Bill has. Of course, if any of you start up a business that looks like it might compete, im going to squash you out of existence which wont make any difference because by the time im done i'll have enough wealth to control everything people read or see so only people who look hard enough would have a clue as to how truly despicable i really am.
I wonder then if XM had sold two devices 1) a digital radio for the streaming broadcast and 2) a digital recording device with no relationship between the two and no dedicated interface to hook the two together, would they have been protected.
It seems straight forward no, unless XM started selling the two as a bundle, then you start going around in circles thinking "oh god my head hurts".
I really dont get what any of it means...
It seems like Lindor actually came out on top, even though her complaint was rejected. Oh so very confused. If i read it correctly it seems Lindor's lawyers wanted the wording of some document changed that said that "just having a shared files folder wasn't enough" to be illegal, that failed, but the judge still went with the "you must prove she actually shared copyrighted material" anyway.
One thing that got me the first time i played a character in NWN2 was the feeling the game was quite linear. I then went back and started a new char and realised how wrong I was. The game seems quite seemless if you play a character a certain way (good/evil/etc), and so you look back and think "well all i did was really what the story told me to do". But slight changes along the way seem to change the story you follow quite drastically. Originally it didnt feel like there was much of the npc-giving-little-quests-here-and-there until i'd tried it a couple of times and thought "hey last time this happened".
Generally speaking im a little dissapointed in nwn 2, thought it could have been a fair bit better and the manual for the game (if you didnt play nwn 2 (plus the expansions) is very very bad. A lot of people would be sittting there going "so i craft how?" cause the manual sticks the entire "crafting" experience into one paragraph that basically says "crafting in nwn 2 hasnt changed since nwn 1" (i had to go back to my nwn sou and hotu to remember how to do things not explained in the manual). Which made me wonder if they figured that the only people buying nwn 2 would be those who already had nwn 1 (and also shelled out for the expansions).
Even more frustrating is the fact the manual goes into rediculous depths in other areas where its just not required... very frustrating.
So, how many of you have NWN2 and not NWN1 (forgotten realms things its none of you)?
We hate music, we hate people having it and the world would be a better place without it.
Personally, im just getting to the point where I really dont care anymore... The RIAA are scum, MPAA are scum, and the IFPI well they're scum too.
All I care about is that I dont work for the RIAA. I dont know how those guy manage to sleep at night doing the things they do, i really just wouldn't be able to live with myself. Its quite sad when you try and put yourself in their shoe's and see it from their point of view.
The kind of lawsuits they've put against students, grand people and even the dead really says alot about how much they lack even the basic forms of being a human.
Im still trying to decide whether the novell/ms deal was a good thing, but I realy find it hard to believe hula got canned becuase of it.
Every second post seems to be a novell post and how "their descision to do x" is soley based on their new "partnership". If MS really are at the helm then im really not sure it matters alot, It makes suse look more attractive to corporates but there are plenty of options out there that dont involve selling your soul to the devil.
I remember a post a while ago about ways Microsoft could harm linux, i wish i could find the link but it talked about things like "encorage forking within linux" or words to that effect. It'll be interesting to see if just the mere smell of MS on Novell will be enough to create a scism that'll result in some form of forking here...
As I sit there coding some piece of rather innocent software blissfully unaware of the world around me, i wonder how many patents im infringing with every line of code....
This is quite seriously scary stuff in my opinion and just goes to emphasize how we really shouldnt have software patents in the first place. Sadly, im a big fan of big blue and dislike amazon quite alot.
I wonder how many people, who code just "stumble" on the same idea. If you locked a coder in a black box and told him write a site that sells things online and make it "feature" rich, how many patents would he infringe?
The broad nature of the patents (or at least how they are described in the article) makes me pray to god IBM dont win this one.