If you look at the FACTS, religious nutjobs, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR RELIGIONS IS THE SAME. From Bhuddism to Christianity (all it's flavors) to Islam and back, it's all based on the same damn story, just distilled and rewritten and distorted by whoever happened to be in power at the time.
While I agree that religion, particularly organized religion, does a lot of harm and is often used as a control mechanism by those seeking power, I don't think it is fair to paint quite as broad of strokes as you are with your statements. There are people who believe in and adhere to a religion and have no interest in gaining power over others. Different sects of Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Hindi, and many others teach personal responsibility and religion without appealing to the organized religion as an authority and without submitting your own judgement to the judgement of others. In fact, I'd consider that to be a defining characteristic of a true religion.
Oh well, I guess we live in a world of idiots.
Maybe so, but that does not mean ignoring religious teachings is ideal. I've read the Christian Bible, the Qur'an, the Torah, a collection of Zen Buddhist, Confucianism, and Taoist works, Masonic references, The Gateless Gate, The Book of Mormon, and a whole pile of other important religious works. In many of them I discovered useful philosophies, parables, cautionary tales, logic premises, and ideals. I suspect a large number of adherents to these respective religions have not bothered to read the works they claim to be adhering to. There is a lot worthwhile in these works for someone willing to consider them critically and not looking to find support for some agenda they want to push. There is a lot of entertainment and perspective if nothing else. A person need not be a follower to have a religion or even be a believer to benefit from a religion. If you have not really considered these works, I recommend you try to find time.
"STD clinic london" I typed as fast as I could and hoped she didn't notice! Turned out her PC had a virus too.
Actually, a lot of people looking for an STD clinic might just be looking for a free place to get testing. I know I go get a spot check every year or so as a "just in case" measure. I'm a lot more comfortable with the prospect of being intimate with someone who I know is concerned about this sort of thing. A lot of people contract STDs from others, because those other people don't bother to find out if they have anything. It's the same thing with condoms. If a girl does not seem interested in using them, who else has she slept with that she wasn't interested in using them with? It is sad that someone who may just be being a responsible person is automatically subjected to this type of stigma.
How long ago was it that people would refer to homosexuality as "sick, disgusting" et al?
Save your breath. Most of the people supporting this type of legislation are religious nutjobs who still consider homosexuality to be sick and would like to see it banned.
Depends on how you interpret / how far you want to trust the DMCA's Reverse Engineering exception.
Not at all. The DMCA makes illegal the distribution of tools that can be used to break encryption used in copyright protection schemes, not creating or using said tools.
What makes you think this would be illegal? Removing DRM is not illegal in and of itself. Having tools to remove DRM is not illegal in and of itself. Cracking encryption is not even illegal, in and of itself (although this just uses your already owned key to decrypt and make a copy of the content of the files, it does not actually break the encryption). The only thing illegal in this scenario that I can think of is publishing the tools used to do it, which may or may not be illegal according to the very vague DMCA. So, download the tools, but don't use bittorrent or redistribute the tools and I don't see how anyone can claim you did anything illegal.
There's no reason that you couldn't do this over any other connection between the two computers, such as ethernet, Bluetooth, or 802.11. It's like the way they have all these cool sync tools... that don't quite work right if you have two computers unless you're using ".Mac".
Well, considering they are the only one to provide it at all, it is still way better than any other OS I've tried. In any case, allowing this via ethernet or any normal network channel can be a huge security risk. By limiting it to firewire they not only insure you have a connection that won't take days to transfer, but also remove the need to address serious security concerns with the feature. Bluetooth would take way too long to be useful for most users.
Neither are self-selected surveys of people who are amazingly willing to give Apple a break no matter how badly they screw things up.
Self selected surveys are not ideal as they tend to pull in the extremes, the very satisfied or irate. They are still a lot better than a sampling size as small as your own personal experience though. Also, Consumer reports does not just do surveys, they also anonymously buy machines and do spot testing.
Apple fans were saying the same kinds of things about headless Macs right up to the day before the mini came out.
Look, what Apple offers at any given time is what fits in their risk/profit analysis. They simply can't afford to make a machine that perfectly fits every user out there, so they have to target the biggest markets. Maybe someday they will come out with another pizza box. Maybe not. It does not matter. They will offer what they offer. If you need something outside of that, you'll have to buy from another vendor or get something that may not be the ideal fit for you.
If hotplugging PS/2 equipment could truly be damaging to the system, I can't imagine that the designers wouldn't have gone through more effort to secure the connectors far more.
PS/2 is a specification from IBM that went along with their OS2 system. Back then, users were corporations and hobbyists and lots of things could fry your computer. How often did someone detach a mouse or keyboard and plug it back in, especially when no OS supported rescanning for the devices? Even so, the chances of damaging your system by doing this once were and are small. Doing it regularly, however, could easily result in burning out either the controller, or later the fuse on the mainboard.
... it would be easy for the victims to sue the computer manufacturer.
If you misuse machinery and it breaks, you have a hard time winning a lawsuit. The instructions on almost all computers, even now, clearly tell you not to plug in PS/2 devices while the computer is running. Does Windows even support this? Now that computers are ubiquitous, manufactures generally try to use dynamic fuses to make this less of an issue, but even today, how many normal computer users do you know that leave their machine on when not in use and ever unplug the keyboard and mouse? Don't mistake that for assuming all PS/2 sockets will survive regular hot plugging.
Just keep hounding Adobe with requests for Linux versions of all of their products. They will eventually realize it's wise to cater to a growing market.
Umm, is this the same Adobe that cancelled the Linux, Mac, and Solaris versions of Framemaker a few years after they bought it, abandoning more than half of their install base?
If they continue to ignore Linux, they risk being rendered irrelevant, especially with Xara, Inkscape, krita, and the gimp all quickly maturing.
Those are great projects, but Linux really does account for a tiny percentage of desktop users. If 95% of the industry is on Windows or Mac, they won't be hurting too much to lose the Linux market. What needs to happen id for Linux to grab a significant chunk of the market, or adhere to standards compatible with a significant chunk of the market. Personally, I think VMs for mainstream apps and deployment in cost sensitive segments of the market are key.
Communisim is bad because it goes against human nature, and therefore is doomed to failure in the long run.
I strongly disagree. Communism works and has worked for as long as human history can record it. It is not against human nature for multiple people to cooperate for the benefit of all of them.
Therefore, in order to maintain a communist system, one must eventually use force.
This is also untrue. One example of communism is the nuclear family. Several people pool their resources and share a home, food, chores, etc. If one wants to leave, there is no reason they need to be forced to stay.
But that's typical of most, if not all, utopian philsophies. You set out to establish a utopia, an ideal system, a man-made paradise where all is good and evil is vanquished. But next thing you know, you find yourself enforcing that utopia at the point of a gun, or are refusing people to leave the utopia after they've become disenchanted.
You're making a fatal misjudgment. "Utopian philosophies" don't fail. Extremism fails. Every economy in the world is a blend of capitalism, communism, and socialism. Trying to eradicate any of these is an extreme and is what results in horrific failure, historically.
Fortunately, most utopias remain small (cults) so they harm only to the small number of people that were misfortunate enough to join them. Communists, on the other hand, tried to impose their utopia on vast numbers of people, to great harm.
There is nothing harmful about communism and nothing about it that implies it has to impose itself on large numbers of people. Communes have existed for thousands of years and are still chugging along just fine. The problem with communism, is that it becomes less and less effective the larger the communist cell grows. Moreover, since it necessarily concentrates decision making, it is more prone to authoritarian abuse than competitive systems.
The real discussion is the proper balance of communism, capitalism, and socialism within a given society. Communist cells compete in a capitalist economy against one another and everyone gives some to help those in need. In the US right now, we don't have socialized health care or drug treatment. We don't have progressive inheritance taxes. Our communist cells are mostly family units, although we also have some tightly knit communities in the form of communes, monasteries, and co-ops. The cell size is shrinking as more and more families become single parent affairs and as extended families spread out and break up.
If you look at the quality of living around the world, it suggests the US has too little socialism, and probably too small of communist cells for optimal efficiency.
Taking this discussion to the main topic, this article is simply another example of Communist government trying to impose a utopia on the citizens.
Ummm, how do you figure? These are people with communist leanings, but not working within a communist cell at all. They are a capitalist economy as much as the US is. Communism has absolutely no bearing on this decision at all. Also, they're not imposing anything. They suggested, but did not order the socialized education system to move away from a company that is a monopoly and which removes the advantages of capitalism, they wish to enjoy. To summarize, this was a bunch of people with communist leanings, directing the socialized part of their economy, to move towards more capitalism. A real capitalist would be overjoyed to hear it.
I often read about vendor lock in, and wonder if people actually realize what they are saying.
I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding what vendor lock-in is. First, it is a barrier to making choices and usually lock-in only refers to intentional methods of creating these, not incidental ones. Second, it is not any barrier to change it is barrier to changing vendors.
ANY choice made in IT means some kind of lock-in. If I go all OSS I lock myself into something else.
"Something" is not a vendor. If I buy a hammer, there is a barrier to using a wooden mallet. I have to go to the store and buy one. I t takes time, effort, and money. This is not vendor lock-in. If the hammer was rigger to explode if a mallet from a different company was brought near it, that would be vendor lock-in.
Suppose I install Linux desktops throughout my company. Switching to another platform will be a lot of work, but I can switch to all sorts of various Linux distros, hire different companies for support, and hire anyone I want to to make customizations. None of these choices are limited to one vendor. If Redhat and Suse are competing to provide my new mail client and support, I've avoided vendor lock-in and the lack of competition which is the harm it brings.
Vendor lock in as such is a myth, there is alwais[sic] a path that's being closed with every choice of tool...
Yeah, but that is not vendor lock-in. Choosing tools that adhere to standards allows you to take competitive bids for future products. Vendor lock-in means some aspect of a previous purchase has made it too hard, for artificial reasons, to go with a different vendor than the previous project.
However, my opinion is that, as a whole, it wasn't any better then Windows 98.
I installed and used it too, but I can't imagine how you came to that conclusion. It was so much better in so many ways that it would take a lot of time simply to list them. It failed because it was not pre-installed by major manufacturers. MS managed to use their monopoly to strong-arm them into ditching it. The same OEM contracts and discriminatory pricing stop major companies from pre-installing Linux.
I'm more referring to the fact that you can't do a lot of things that you can do in the shell in Linux without dealing with the NetInfo Manager in OS X. A lot of the flatfiles in the/etc directory in OS X are just there for historical reasons and don't really do anything.
That is really just the way info is stored, not a difference between how usable the shell is. You just have to access the netinfo information using commands to manipulate the database (nidump, niutil, etc.). I actually find the CLI in OS X to be more useful than on Linux because of the nature of many of the tasks I perform. I can shell script command line options to photoshop on OS X, but trying to do the same on Linux (with WINE) was to cumbersome and cludgy for me to even get it working. Mostly this is Adobe's fault and I can do 80% of the same thing using GIMP. I guess that is really more of an application availability argument than a CLI argument. It all depends upon what an individual needs to get done, I suppose.
If all the OSS guys HATE microsoft so much, and they think Microsoft sucks so badly, then why the hell can't they build an OS that is actually able to beat windows at its own game?
Look, I'm not going to go into the economic models of monopolies, but the relative quality and ease of use of Windows and Linux does not have a lot to do with which one dominates the market. Windows is a monopoly. Their customers are locked in and while another OS might be the best choice for them were that not so, it does not make economic sense for an individual to change. Windows has dominated the OEM market and no one sells a non-Windows OS, even as an option for a normal user's pre-install. BeOS was better than Windows by a huge margin, but the company failed anyway. Your belief that making a better, more usable Linux will allow it to claim the desktop is misguided.
Before you slam me, understand that I'm advocating linux. Yes, I'm criticizing the Linux community, but I'm doing it because I (somewhat) agree with the goals of that community.
I think you are misguided. Linux is serving its customers, many of whom are developers. Linux has survived because it is not a closed source OS, subject to all the normal market pressures that allow MS to kill off other companies. It may never be the case that Linux breaks MS's monopoly, but they don't have to in order to serve those who contribute to it and, incidentally, anyone else.
I would love to see a world where Windows has a 75% market share.
The desktop market is unlikely to ever be significantly divided unless MS's monopoly is stopped. It should have been stopped years ago, but our politicians are too corrupt. I'd love to see a world where Windows held 75% of the market, but as provided by two different companies, each with their own version and rights to the code. If MS was split up, competition would re-enter the market and it wouldn't matter so much if a user was running Windows or OS X or Linux because all those OS's would be responding to normal competitive pressures and getting better and changing to suit the needs of users.
Most Linux distros have plenty of command-line *shells* that outperform anything shipped with OS X and certainly kick the Windows cmd.exe shell up and down the field.
While the closest thing Windows has to a usable shell environment is a cygwin install, what exactly are you taking about with OS X? Bash and tcsh are both pretty usable and ship by default. What shell are you thinking of that you find superior? I actually wish most Linux distros would bring their terminal integration with the rest of their OS up to the same level as the default terminal.app on OS X. On OS X, if I use the GUI to move a folder, in which my shell happens to be also within, the shell is informed and updates instantly. On Gnome, I've had some weird experiences and in the past has thrown errors in the GUI (although this was quite a while ago, I hardly ever use the GUI in Llinux aside from opening terminals).
Umm, you're complaining about the CPU usage in the OS X GUI? I think I've seen it jump up to 5% once or twice. It has no noticeable effect upon my CPU cycles and it does serve a purpose by providing feedback as to what is going on, rather than leaving me wondering or uninformed. To each their own though.
As I recent migrant from Windows to Ubuntu - I found Linux to be far more enjoyable than my iBook (or Windows) ever was.
It is good to go with what you enjoy.
Just look at the stuff modern Linux has XGL/Compiz - more impressive than OS X, although admittedly in alpha.
I'm not sure how you draw this conclusion, especially if you are comparing this alpha against the coregraphics and coreanimation features in the latest OS X 10.5 beta. I'll just assume there is some feature here I don't know about, but all the demos I've seen seem to be attempts to catch up to some of the flashy graphics in OS X.
Screensavers - (don't laugh...
I'm having a hard time not laughing here. You're really saying you prefer an OS based upon the default screensavers?
Installation - on Ubuntu, almost everything installs with one click of the mouse, with browsable game/app libraries.
The centralized repositories are nice, but I've never found them to be comprehensive enough. Further, whenever I want to run some niche application I have to hope it is packaged for one of the formats Ubuntu supports. Otherwise, I have to hope the build process works for that distro and deal with the dependencies manually. I've given up in disgust after failing to install something more than once. The central install/uninstall/update is much nicer than OS X. OS X wins hands down for ease of installation and uninstallation though, with the drag and drop ability. OS X also wins quite a few points with me for having portable apps, I can throw onto a network drive, thumb drive, or IM to someone and have it work without any messing around. Inherited levels of preferences make multi-user systems a lot nicer with OS X apps. You can have a default homepage, or server configured for some app globally, per user group, and then individually. That means by default all employees can use the main server, engineering employees can use their dedicated ones, and individuals can override the defaults and use what they want. It is just like permissions, but for preferences. Finally, I much prefer the storage of resources in OS X packages. Finding the graphics, sounds, music, movies, etc. is simple and standardized, as is handling of FAT binaries.
Game support is a little lower than OS X but neither are worth mentioning compared to Windows.
Hmm, I might argue this. There is a lot more official support for games on the mac. Take a look at the top 20 games for any given year. You might find one or two that don't have a mac version. You might find 3 or 4 that do have a Linux version. WINE somewhat mitigates this, but that is for a subset of users and the mac gaming version from cedega is already in beta. For a hardcore gamer you''re obviously right, but for a casual gamer the mac is a lot nicer than Linux, IMHO.
Takes the better parts of OS X (Expose, Spotlight/Beagle) and drops the ones I personally dislike (Dock, Finder)
This is obviously a matter of personal preference. Personally, I find certain features that are still missing from Linux (like system services), to be too much of a deal breaker for me to switch for my primary workstation. Combining that with the unavailability or lackluster performance of certain mainstream applications like InDesign and Dreamweaver and Linux just does not stack up as a workstation for my uses.
Unique apps like Amarok, which is more enjoyable to use than iTunes; Tomboy, etc.
I've found both platforms have unique apps, and of course we will all have personal preferences. I have noted, that most of the Linux only apps, can actually run on the mac, while the reverse is not true.
Plus if you're into development and compiling stuff yourself, you get the rewards that come with that as well.
Ummm, you can't do this on the mac? Or are you referring to compiling the entire OS itself and not just applications?
But I really believe that desktop Linux is beginning to emerge now, and
Just like being a game developer, in theory it sounds easy and simple. In practice, it's tedious and complex.
It doesn't sound easy or simple, but it is doable and something of the sort has been done before. Look at the easy to use editing tools in Neverwinter nights or Warcraft 3, or any number of other games. Something with that level of sophistication and ease of use, but integrated with a delivery service and open source.
But... look at Crystalspace...
Cystalspace is an engine and one that has some traction, but it is not a set of easy, GUI dev tools. In fact, crystalspace may be a good candidate for adoption for someone looking to start a commercial venture like the one I'm describing. Build some closed source dev tools, standardize the module format, and provide a reference game including public domain textures and models (but trademarked characters and settings). It is a lot of work, but with a pile of venture capital and handful of really good developers it has a lot of potential for being a good and stable source of ROI for a long time. The free game will pull in the eyes and the community will pay via ads, dev tool licensing, and by buying modules.
This is an unimportant point in the context, but I still feel the need to point out that it's wrong. PS/2 devices can be plugged and unplugged during operation, and they even have hotplug detect.
If you bother to read the other comments in this thread, hot swapping is not part of the PS/2 spec. Some hardware manufacturers provide more robust IO connections and dynamic fuses to keep hot swapping PS/2 from potentially damaging your hardware, but not all hardware vendors do this. Especially on older machines, you should never hot swap PS/2 connectors unless you want to risk burning out your controllers. Claiming otherwise is doing a great disservice to people and may cause them to damage their gear. Please stop it.
Yep, the way Apple makes it a pain to replace the drives in their laptops is another pet peeve of mine about the Mac. On my old Thinkpad it was a matter of undoing one screw and four clips.
My old thinkpad was a pain in the ass to swap the drive. It doesn't matter. 90% or more of all people have to get a technician to do that anyway.
But... what I don't get here... is why, if the laptop is in a good enough condition to sell, you can't just copy your files off over the network? I've only used target mode for recovery from trashed hardware.
It is not quite that simple. Using the Apple installer and the Firewire disk mode means you don't have to worry about files, settings, encryption keys, software, user accounts, or anything else. It transfers all of it over, even if the user has no idea where the preferences are stored. To do the same thing you'd have to do a clean install, change all of the global setting, including recreating all of the user accounts and setting all of the user's passwords again, reinstall all of the software, and then transfer over all of the files and put them in the same places they were. No thank you.
As an owner of a Rev A G3, a Rev A iMac, and a pre-AGP G4, I have to say that I haven't found that Apple's gear achieves "decent quality".
Your personal experience is not an objective analysis of how Apple hardware compares to other vendors. All such studies I've seen by reputable companies rate Apple hardware at the top of the heap along with Sony and usually a little better then IBM.
And the problem is that they're not just "not to everyone's taste"... they seem deliberately designed to limit their appeal.
Apple sells about as much hardware as Gateway. Both target certain market segments. Compare the choices you get from Gateway and only Gateway to those you get from Apple. Notice how for particular uses there is not a really good choice?
The way to deal with the "combinations of hardware" problem is to make sure there's at least one product in each category that's expandible[sic].
The market for expandable all-in-one machines and small form factor machines is too tiny to be profitable to them. Their towers are plenty expandable. Their laptops need to be small enough that people can use them as portables. They make sure their pro line has expansion ports and since they are selling as many or more laptops as any PC vendor does right now, I'd say they are giving most people what they want.
Take the Mac mini's internals and put them in a slab with one PCI-E slot and two 3.5" hard drive bays and I'd pay $700 for it.
Yup, you and 500 other guys. The market is not big enough to make them money. If you want expansion slots, pony up for the tower. Otherwise, deal with it.
Maybe I am out of the loop and game programming has indeed turned into some drag and drop excercise, but I am of the old skool where we used to optimize inner loops in assembly to get our pixels onto the screen as fast as possible when me and my friends were coding some crappy little games in high school.
So here's the deal. To make a fun game, you don't need really fast, impressive graphics. You need gameplay. You absolutely need some good coders to develop good gameplay, but you also need people with vision and who know what works. The next two items on the list are graphics (both coding and artwork) and story. Some of the best games of all time are the ones that managed to get all of these components. Some of the worst games of all time have great graphics and coding behind them, but the gameplay and story is a big pile of crap. The thing is, a lot of people recognize that the coding to make good gameplay can be reusable. That is to say, with a good gaming engine, some scripting, artwork, story, and map makers, you can make a really good game without having to do a lot more actual coding. Companies try this and sometimes succeed all the time when they buy access to engines and dev tools others made.
There are a lot of people out there who are talented storytellers, or artists, or just have a really good idea of what makes a fun game, but they don't have a good way to leverage those skills and those skills are often not valued by many of the clueless development houses.
Since they have no chance to get into the regular gaming industry, a lot of amateurs with other pieces of the puzzle (or who think they have them) would like to have access to a chance to contribute. This creates a big market for gaming schools and for easy to use game dev software.
I wish somebody would, but not because I think it'd work... But because I'd like to use it;)
I've seen similar models work to build mod communities, even around relatively obscure games. Back in the 90s I remember the Macintosh only game "Realmz" which shipped with really cheap dev tools and had a built in service for downloading and selling these new modules. People were happy to pay $15-$30 for more content, some from the original author and some from other people. The key is to build a game that has lots of value in the story and in addictive gameplay. Role-playing style games where you build up characters and inventories are ideal for this. I knew people who installed mac emulators just to play that old tile-based game, because despite not having the most detailed graphics, it was just fun.
The other component to this is that there are lots of open source engine and game projects now. Some of them are pretty cool, but none of them has any real commercial backing or business plan involved. It would be a huge boon to be able to leverage this pool of code and talent and all of it comes off of the cost of developing your for-sale games. You can probably sell modules for such a system for as little as $15 and still make a reasonable profit. And all the time the community will be donating ideas, models, textures, bug fixes, and revenue from the ads on the site.
Another nice aspect of this, is it does not preclude the boxed sale market. There is nothing stopping the maker of one of the modules from packaging the whole engine and their module and shipping it, at which point the game purchaser is subjected to the whole community. It is like free advertising for it.
You are by no means the only one who would really go for a chance to try this out, and even some fairly competent coders would like a chance to build some resume fodder to help them get into the market. Even without any large companies getting on board, I think the original developers combined with the amateur community could make some really good money on this. And if the developers happened to have an easy way to port these to consoles, for a reasonable fee, well that is just icing on the cake.
Right... It's called 'every teenage boy wants to do this with his life.' It's the next generation version of 'rock star.' It also means that not everyone who is 'seriously pursuing this field' is even remotely competent at it. They just want it really bad.
All these fly by night gaming schools are tapping into this market, but there is another way. A few really competent developers could clean up by grabbing one of the open source gaming engines out there, getting some venture capital and building it out into an open source gaming virtual console. Here's the basic idea. You build an open source, cross-platform gaming engine that takes modules, just like neverwinter nights, but a bit more versatile. You build into this a service that allows people to sell and/or give away modules they develop, supported by advertisements. At the same time you build freeware and more comprehensive payware development tools for this engine. You build one game, or maybe half a game including art and the whole shebang as your hook and you give the engine, game and freeware tools away for free. Get it bundled by Windows OEMs and in Linux distros and heck on Apple machines if you can. If you can't, make sure it is a free download everyone knows about.
At this point you have dropped a pile of money on this game/engine and don't have any real return on your investment. This is where the aforementioned market comes in. All the people who want to be game developers will mess around with your free tools and a few will make something worthwhile. A number more will shell out for your professional dev tools. At this point you have a fairly widespread service and will be getting a lot of good press. You have a lot of the work of making a game done for people, so the investment to bring one to market is small. This means companies might consider releasing cheap titles. They will want your dev tools. They may well want improvements to the engine which will benefit you or which they will pay you to make. And who better to hire to do development than the makers and maintainers of the engine?
Throughout all of this you'll be able to undercut other companies developing engines because you are leveraging free work from the open source community. Heck, there are a number of engines now you can leverage. If nothing else you can make and sell more modules, providing low cost games and building brands. If it takes off enough you'll be able to clean up simply on the advertisements on the site and the dev costs will be incidental.
I seriously think this would work, but am way too busy/comfortable to go for it myself. Someone, steal my idea.
Hve[sic] you never heard of possesion[sic] of stolen property? I realize there are differences making the analogy difficult, but there are parrallels[sic] as well. Just because the law says the uploading is the crime, don't count yourself invincible because you only download.
Ummm, what!?!
Just because the law says attacking people is a crime, don't think you're invincible just because you only play baseball with that bat. If you're not copying something you're not violating the copyright and, thus you're not committing a crime. No one is convicted of downloading. Stop spreading this FUD.
Ray tracing also suffers terribly from "jaggies". Edges look bad because rays can just miss an object and cause really bad stepping on the edges of objects.
I know traditional ray-tracers solve this with an anti-aliasing pass, but I thought real-time ray tracers solved this by incorporating a radiacity engine instead.
Effects like focal length, fog, bump mapping etc. cause things to get even more complex. Most pictures rendered with high quality on Blender, POVRay etc. would take minutes if not hours even on a fast / dual core processor.
The only way you'd get 30fps is if cut your ray trace depth to 1 or 2, used a couple of lights, cut the screen res down and forgot about fixing jaggies.
But we're not looking for parity with a professional ray tracing used in film or print. We're looking at parity or improvements upon the quality of video game rendering today, which is nowhere near the that level of photo-realism. They actually claim to have run benchmarks, and given how fast you can render an animation of better quality than you'd see in a video game using Bryce or something and a modern processor, I'm inclined to believe it is becoming feasible.
Oh and find time for all the other things that apps and games must do.
This is where we're coming into a discussion of bottlenecks in such a system. Assume in three years everyone will have a quad-core machine or better. Most games are not CPU bound even today. That means you could have two cores sitting basically idle. If general purpose CPUs can take over the the rendering, you may well have no problem finding the CPU cycles. Then we're talking about memory and disk access as the real bottlenecks and the GPU can be used for putting it all together and applying filter effects and the like.
Will this work? I don't know. Will it work so well that it will beat current rendering tech? Again, I don't know. But I'm not convinced by your arguments that it won't.
All the proprietary hardware companies have been succesful using this model, so naturally it applies to open source software companies.
You just don't get it. IBM is an open source software company. They create tons of OSS code and they use it to make a ton of money selling hardware, services, and in other markets. Think of it this way. What if the union of carpenters and construction workers figured out a way to create better hammers, cheaper than the manufacturing industry can. They did so, and benefited greatly and some of them were getting paid to be the hammer maker at their construction company. You argue," yeah, but they are construction companies not manufacturing companies. No manufacturer can make a profit selling open source hammers." It is beside the point.
Developers are paid and code is written and companies use it because it is cheaper and works better. Everyone is making a profit and for large projects there are teams dedicated to just making that product. Some people work just for that team, making customizations, fixes, providing support, and consulting. They do quite well. If you want to claim they don't qualify as a company, fine. But to argue that companies that are devoted to open source software are not profitable there are about a million easy counter examples. My company produces code for OpenBSD, Linux, and dozens of other open source projects. We all work on salary and all get paid quite well. We're heavily invested in open source code, but we sell complete packages built around it, including hardware, services, support, and some closed source code. We're and open source software company as much as anything else. You just have to be able to comprehend a different kind of business plan.
Why did anyone mod this up? At best it is a straw man argument. At worst it is a troll.
Oh wait, let me guess... "support", right? Oh, sure...
Allow me to translate. The previous poster said that the question was answered over and over again. This poster asserts that the previous poster must have meant that answer was "support," even though that was never mentioned anywhere, and then went on to decry (not debunk he simply makes assertions to the contrary, but does not provide any reasons).
Just in case this last poster was just ignorant and not a troll, allow me to make a quick summary of how OSS fits into the business world. Proprietary software is made by a single company and sold to multiple companies for as much as they can get. A cheaper method is for the companies that want to use software to collaborate on the development (OSS) and each only pays for what they need. In addition to that, they all get access to bug fixes and features someone else needed for free. Sometimes this is done by using internal developers who become experts in the software. Sometimes this is done by hiring outside developers to do the work you need. For projects like Apache, there is a core group of developers paid to make general improvements and to make specific customizations or improvements on commission. Developers are paid for support, customization, new features, and sometimes just given a salary to make general improvements and be an internal expert until something specific is required. The actual code is used to provide services or products to other people.
In this model, the developers have less chance of "making it big" but at the same time they can undercut the costs of the competition and provide a better product and have more widespread adoption of their product, which brings a lot of prestige and can lead to other financial opportunities. This model has only been working for a few decades and is in constant use by IBM, Apple, Cisco, and pretty much any major IT company you can think of, and I've, personally, read explanations not very different from this one a dozen times. Please stop asking this.
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If you look at the FACTS, religious nutjobs, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR RELIGIONS IS THE SAME. From Bhuddism to Christianity (all it's flavors) to Islam and back, it's all based on the same damn story, just distilled and rewritten and distorted by whoever happened to be in power at the time.
While I agree that religion, particularly organized religion, does a lot of harm and is often used as a control mechanism by those seeking power, I don't think it is fair to paint quite as broad of strokes as you are with your statements. There are people who believe in and adhere to a religion and have no interest in gaining power over others. Different sects of Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Hindi, and many others teach personal responsibility and religion without appealing to the organized religion as an authority and without submitting your own judgement to the judgement of others. In fact, I'd consider that to be a defining characteristic of a true religion.
Oh well, I guess we live in a world of idiots.
Maybe so, but that does not mean ignoring religious teachings is ideal. I've read the Christian Bible, the Qur'an, the Torah, a collection of Zen Buddhist, Confucianism, and Taoist works, Masonic references, The Gateless Gate, The Book of Mormon, and a whole pile of other important religious works. In many of them I discovered useful philosophies, parables, cautionary tales, logic premises, and ideals. I suspect a large number of adherents to these respective religions have not bothered to read the works they claim to be adhering to. There is a lot worthwhile in these works for someone willing to consider them critically and not looking to find support for some agenda they want to push. There is a lot of entertainment and perspective if nothing else. A person need not be a follower to have a religion or even be a believer to benefit from a religion. If you have not really considered these works, I recommend you try to find time.
"STD clinic london" I typed as fast as I could and hoped she didn't notice! Turned out her PC had a virus too.
Actually, a lot of people looking for an STD clinic might just be looking for a free place to get testing. I know I go get a spot check every year or so as a "just in case" measure. I'm a lot more comfortable with the prospect of being intimate with someone who I know is concerned about this sort of thing. A lot of people contract STDs from others, because those other people don't bother to find out if they have anything. It's the same thing with condoms. If a girl does not seem interested in using them, who else has she slept with that she wasn't interested in using them with? It is sad that someone who may just be being a responsible person is automatically subjected to this type of stigma.
How long ago was it that people would refer to homosexuality as "sick, disgusting" et al?
Save your breath. Most of the people supporting this type of legislation are religious nutjobs who still consider homosexuality to be sick and would like to see it banned.
Depends on how you interpret / how far you want to trust the DMCA's Reverse Engineering exception.
Not at all. The DMCA makes illegal the distribution of tools that can be used to break encryption used in copyright protection schemes, not creating or using said tools.
Is it illegal? Probably.
What makes you think this would be illegal? Removing DRM is not illegal in and of itself. Having tools to remove DRM is not illegal in and of itself. Cracking encryption is not even illegal, in and of itself (although this just uses your already owned key to decrypt and make a copy of the content of the files, it does not actually break the encryption). The only thing illegal in this scenario that I can think of is publishing the tools used to do it, which may or may not be illegal according to the very vague DMCA. So, download the tools, but don't use bittorrent or redistribute the tools and I don't see how anyone can claim you did anything illegal.
There's no reason that you couldn't do this over any other connection between the two computers, such as ethernet, Bluetooth, or 802.11. It's like the way they have all these cool sync tools... that don't quite work right if you have two computers unless you're using ".Mac".
Well, considering they are the only one to provide it at all, it is still way better than any other OS I've tried. In any case, allowing this via ethernet or any normal network channel can be a huge security risk. By limiting it to firewire they not only insure you have a connection that won't take days to transfer, but also remove the need to address serious security concerns with the feature. Bluetooth would take way too long to be useful for most users.
Neither are self-selected surveys of people who are amazingly willing to give Apple a break no matter how badly they screw things up.
Self selected surveys are not ideal as they tend to pull in the extremes, the very satisfied or irate. They are still a lot better than a sampling size as small as your own personal experience though. Also, Consumer reports does not just do surveys, they also anonymously buy machines and do spot testing.
Apple fans were saying the same kinds of things about headless Macs right up to the day before the mini came out.
Look, what Apple offers at any given time is what fits in their risk/profit analysis. They simply can't afford to make a machine that perfectly fits every user out there, so they have to target the biggest markets. Maybe someday they will come out with another pizza box. Maybe not. It does not matter. They will offer what they offer. If you need something outside of that, you'll have to buy from another vendor or get something that may not be the ideal fit for you.
If hotplugging PS/2 equipment could truly be damaging to the system, I can't imagine that the designers wouldn't have gone through more effort to secure the connectors far more.
PS/2 is a specification from IBM that went along with their OS2 system. Back then, users were corporations and hobbyists and lots of things could fry your computer. How often did someone detach a mouse or keyboard and plug it back in, especially when no OS supported rescanning for the devices? Even so, the chances of damaging your system by doing this once were and are small. Doing it regularly, however, could easily result in burning out either the controller, or later the fuse on the mainboard.
If you misuse machinery and it breaks, you have a hard time winning a lawsuit. The instructions on almost all computers, even now, clearly tell you not to plug in PS/2 devices while the computer is running. Does Windows even support this? Now that computers are ubiquitous, manufactures generally try to use dynamic fuses to make this less of an issue, but even today, how many normal computer users do you know that leave their machine on when not in use and ever unplug the keyboard and mouse? Don't mistake that for assuming all PS/2 sockets will survive regular hot plugging.
Just keep hounding Adobe with requests for Linux versions of all of their products. They will eventually realize it's wise to cater to a growing market.
Umm, is this the same Adobe that cancelled the Linux, Mac, and Solaris versions of Framemaker a few years after they bought it, abandoning more than half of their install base?
If they continue to ignore Linux, they risk being rendered irrelevant, especially with Xara, Inkscape, krita, and the gimp all quickly maturing.
Those are great projects, but Linux really does account for a tiny percentage of desktop users. If 95% of the industry is on Windows or Mac, they won't be hurting too much to lose the Linux market. What needs to happen id for Linux to grab a significant chunk of the market, or adhere to standards compatible with a significant chunk of the market. Personally, I think VMs for mainstream apps and deployment in cost sensitive segments of the market are key.
Communisim is bad because it goes against human nature, and therefore is doomed to failure in the long run.
I strongly disagree. Communism works and has worked for as long as human history can record it. It is not against human nature for multiple people to cooperate for the benefit of all of them.
Therefore, in order to maintain a communist system, one must eventually use force.
This is also untrue. One example of communism is the nuclear family. Several people pool their resources and share a home, food, chores, etc. If one wants to leave, there is no reason they need to be forced to stay.
But that's typical of most, if not all, utopian philsophies. You set out to establish a utopia, an ideal system, a man-made paradise where all is good and evil is vanquished. But next thing you know, you find yourself enforcing that utopia at the point of a gun, or are refusing people to leave the utopia after they've become disenchanted.
You're making a fatal misjudgment. "Utopian philosophies" don't fail. Extremism fails. Every economy in the world is a blend of capitalism, communism, and socialism. Trying to eradicate any of these is an extreme and is what results in horrific failure, historically.
Fortunately, most utopias remain small (cults) so they harm only to the small number of people that were misfortunate enough to join them. Communists, on the other hand, tried to impose their utopia on vast numbers of people, to great harm.
There is nothing harmful about communism and nothing about it that implies it has to impose itself on large numbers of people. Communes have existed for thousands of years and are still chugging along just fine. The problem with communism, is that it becomes less and less effective the larger the communist cell grows. Moreover, since it necessarily concentrates decision making, it is more prone to authoritarian abuse than competitive systems.
The real discussion is the proper balance of communism, capitalism, and socialism within a given society. Communist cells compete in a capitalist economy against one another and everyone gives some to help those in need. In the US right now, we don't have socialized health care or drug treatment. We don't have progressive inheritance taxes. Our communist cells are mostly family units, although we also have some tightly knit communities in the form of communes, monasteries, and co-ops. The cell size is shrinking as more and more families become single parent affairs and as extended families spread out and break up.
If you look at the quality of living around the world, it suggests the US has too little socialism, and probably too small of communist cells for optimal efficiency.
Taking this discussion to the main topic, this article is simply another example of Communist government trying to impose a utopia on the citizens.
Ummm, how do you figure? These are people with communist leanings, but not working within a communist cell at all. They are a capitalist economy as much as the US is. Communism has absolutely no bearing on this decision at all. Also, they're not imposing anything. They suggested, but did not order the socialized education system to move away from a company that is a monopoly and which removes the advantages of capitalism, they wish to enjoy. To summarize, this was a bunch of people with communist leanings, directing the socialized part of their economy, to move towards more capitalism. A real capitalist would be overjoyed to hear it.
I often read about vendor lock in, and wonder if people actually realize what they are saying.
I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding what vendor lock-in is. First, it is a barrier to making choices and usually lock-in only refers to intentional methods of creating these, not incidental ones. Second, it is not any barrier to change it is barrier to changing vendors.
ANY choice made in IT means some kind of lock-in. If I go all OSS I lock myself into something else.
"Something" is not a vendor. If I buy a hammer, there is a barrier to using a wooden mallet. I have to go to the store and buy one. I t takes time, effort, and money. This is not vendor lock-in. If the hammer was rigger to explode if a mallet from a different company was brought near it, that would be vendor lock-in.
Suppose I install Linux desktops throughout my company. Switching to another platform will be a lot of work, but I can switch to all sorts of various Linux distros, hire different companies for support, and hire anyone I want to to make customizations. None of these choices are limited to one vendor. If Redhat and Suse are competing to provide my new mail client and support, I've avoided vendor lock-in and the lack of competition which is the harm it brings.
Vendor lock in as such is a myth, there is alwais[sic] a path that's being closed with every choice of tool...
Yeah, but that is not vendor lock-in. Choosing tools that adhere to standards allows you to take competitive bids for future products. Vendor lock-in means some aspect of a previous purchase has made it too hard, for artificial reasons, to go with a different vendor than the previous project.
However, my opinion is that, as a whole, it wasn't any better then Windows 98.
I installed and used it too, but I can't imagine how you came to that conclusion. It was so much better in so many ways that it would take a lot of time simply to list them. It failed because it was not pre-installed by major manufacturers. MS managed to use their monopoly to strong-arm them into ditching it. The same OEM contracts and discriminatory pricing stop major companies from pre-installing Linux.
I'm more referring to the fact that you can't do a lot of things that you can do in the shell in Linux without dealing with the NetInfo Manager in OS X. A lot of the flatfiles in the /etc directory in OS X are just there for historical reasons and don't really do anything.
That is really just the way info is stored, not a difference between how usable the shell is. You just have to access the netinfo information using commands to manipulate the database (nidump, niutil, etc.). I actually find the CLI in OS X to be more useful than on Linux because of the nature of many of the tasks I perform. I can shell script command line options to photoshop on OS X, but trying to do the same on Linux (with WINE) was to cumbersome and cludgy for me to even get it working. Mostly this is Adobe's fault and I can do 80% of the same thing using GIMP. I guess that is really more of an application availability argument than a CLI argument. It all depends upon what an individual needs to get done, I suppose.
If all the OSS guys HATE microsoft so much, and they think Microsoft sucks so badly, then why the hell can't they build an OS that is actually able to beat windows at its own game?
Look, I'm not going to go into the economic models of monopolies, but the relative quality and ease of use of Windows and Linux does not have a lot to do with which one dominates the market. Windows is a monopoly. Their customers are locked in and while another OS might be the best choice for them were that not so, it does not make economic sense for an individual to change. Windows has dominated the OEM market and no one sells a non-Windows OS, even as an option for a normal user's pre-install. BeOS was better than Windows by a huge margin, but the company failed anyway. Your belief that making a better, more usable Linux will allow it to claim the desktop is misguided.
Before you slam me, understand that I'm advocating linux. Yes, I'm criticizing the Linux community, but I'm doing it because I (somewhat) agree with the goals of that community.
I think you are misguided. Linux is serving its customers, many of whom are developers. Linux has survived because it is not a closed source OS, subject to all the normal market pressures that allow MS to kill off other companies. It may never be the case that Linux breaks MS's monopoly, but they don't have to in order to serve those who contribute to it and, incidentally, anyone else.
I would love to see a world where Windows has a 75% market share.
The desktop market is unlikely to ever be significantly divided unless MS's monopoly is stopped. It should have been stopped years ago, but our politicians are too corrupt. I'd love to see a world where Windows held 75% of the market, but as provided by two different companies, each with their own version and rights to the code. If MS was split up, competition would re-enter the market and it wouldn't matter so much if a user was running Windows or OS X or Linux because all those OS's would be responding to normal competitive pressures and getting better and changing to suit the needs of users.
Most Linux distros have plenty of command-line *shells* that outperform anything shipped with OS X and certainly kick the Windows cmd.exe shell up and down the field.
While the closest thing Windows has to a usable shell environment is a cygwin install, what exactly are you taking about with OS X? Bash and tcsh are both pretty usable and ship by default. What shell are you thinking of that you find superior? I actually wish most Linux distros would bring their terminal integration with the rest of their OS up to the same level as the default terminal.app on OS X. On OS X, if I use the GUI to move a folder, in which my shell happens to be also within, the shell is informed and updates instantly. On Gnome, I've had some weird experiences and in the past has thrown errors in the GUI (although this was quite a while ago, I hardly ever use the GUI in Llinux aside from opening terminals).
Umm, you're complaining about the CPU usage in the OS X GUI? I think I've seen it jump up to 5% once or twice. It has no noticeable effect upon my CPU cycles and it does serve a purpose by providing feedback as to what is going on, rather than leaving me wondering or uninformed. To each their own though.
As I recent migrant from Windows to Ubuntu - I found Linux to be far more enjoyable than my iBook (or Windows) ever was.
It is good to go with what you enjoy.
Just look at the stuff modern Linux has XGL/Compiz - more impressive than OS X, although admittedly in alpha.
I'm not sure how you draw this conclusion, especially if you are comparing this alpha against the coregraphics and coreanimation features in the latest OS X 10.5 beta. I'll just assume there is some feature here I don't know about, but all the demos I've seen seem to be attempts to catch up to some of the flashy graphics in OS X.
Screensavers - (don't laugh...
I'm having a hard time not laughing here. You're really saying you prefer an OS based upon the default screensavers?
Installation - on Ubuntu, almost everything installs with one click of the mouse, with browsable game/app libraries.
The centralized repositories are nice, but I've never found them to be comprehensive enough. Further, whenever I want to run some niche application I have to hope it is packaged for one of the formats Ubuntu supports. Otherwise, I have to hope the build process works for that distro and deal with the dependencies manually. I've given up in disgust after failing to install something more than once. The central install/uninstall/update is much nicer than OS X. OS X wins hands down for ease of installation and uninstallation though, with the drag and drop ability. OS X also wins quite a few points with me for having portable apps, I can throw onto a network drive, thumb drive, or IM to someone and have it work without any messing around. Inherited levels of preferences make multi-user systems a lot nicer with OS X apps. You can have a default homepage, or server configured for some app globally, per user group, and then individually. That means by default all employees can use the main server, engineering employees can use their dedicated ones, and individuals can override the defaults and use what they want. It is just like permissions, but for preferences. Finally, I much prefer the storage of resources in OS X packages. Finding the graphics, sounds, music, movies, etc. is simple and standardized, as is handling of FAT binaries.
Game support is a little lower than OS X but neither are worth mentioning compared to Windows.
Hmm, I might argue this. There is a lot more official support for games on the mac. Take a look at the top 20 games for any given year. You might find one or two that don't have a mac version. You might find 3 or 4 that do have a Linux version. WINE somewhat mitigates this, but that is for a subset of users and the mac gaming version from cedega is already in beta. For a hardcore gamer you''re obviously right, but for a casual gamer the mac is a lot nicer than Linux, IMHO.
Takes the better parts of OS X (Expose, Spotlight/Beagle) and drops the ones I personally dislike (Dock, Finder)
This is obviously a matter of personal preference. Personally, I find certain features that are still missing from Linux (like system services), to be too much of a deal breaker for me to switch for my primary workstation. Combining that with the unavailability or lackluster performance of certain mainstream applications like InDesign and Dreamweaver and Linux just does not stack up as a workstation for my uses.
Unique apps like Amarok, which is more enjoyable to use than iTunes; Tomboy, etc.
I've found both platforms have unique apps, and of course we will all have personal preferences. I have noted, that most of the Linux only apps, can actually run on the mac, while the reverse is not true.
Plus if you're into development and compiling stuff yourself, you get the rewards that come with that as well.
Ummm, you can't do this on the mac? Or are you referring to compiling the entire OS itself and not just applications?
But I really believe that desktop Linux is beginning to emerge now, and
Just like being a game developer, in theory it sounds easy and simple. In practice, it's tedious and complex.
It doesn't sound easy or simple, but it is doable and something of the sort has been done before. Look at the easy to use editing tools in Neverwinter nights or Warcraft 3, or any number of other games. Something with that level of sophistication and ease of use, but integrated with a delivery service and open source.
But... look at Crystalspace...
Cystalspace is an engine and one that has some traction, but it is not a set of easy, GUI dev tools. In fact, crystalspace may be a good candidate for adoption for someone looking to start a commercial venture like the one I'm describing. Build some closed source dev tools, standardize the module format, and provide a reference game including public domain textures and models (but trademarked characters and settings). It is a lot of work, but with a pile of venture capital and handful of really good developers it has a lot of potential for being a good and stable source of ROI for a long time. The free game will pull in the eyes and the community will pay via ads, dev tool licensing, and by buying modules.
This is an unimportant point in the context, but I still feel the need to point out that it's wrong. PS/2 devices can be plugged and unplugged during operation, and they even have hotplug detect.
If you bother to read the other comments in this thread, hot swapping is not part of the PS/2 spec. Some hardware manufacturers provide more robust IO connections and dynamic fuses to keep hot swapping PS/2 from potentially damaging your hardware, but not all hardware vendors do this. Especially on older machines, you should never hot swap PS/2 connectors unless you want to risk burning out your controllers. Claiming otherwise is doing a great disservice to people and may cause them to damage their gear. Please stop it.
Yep, the way Apple makes it a pain to replace the drives in their laptops is another pet peeve of mine about the Mac. On my old Thinkpad it was a matter of undoing one screw and four clips.
My old thinkpad was a pain in the ass to swap the drive. It doesn't matter. 90% or more of all people have to get a technician to do that anyway.
But... what I don't get here... is why, if the laptop is in a good enough condition to sell, you can't just copy your files off over the network? I've only used target mode for recovery from trashed hardware.
It is not quite that simple. Using the Apple installer and the Firewire disk mode means you don't have to worry about files, settings, encryption keys, software, user accounts, or anything else. It transfers all of it over, even if the user has no idea where the preferences are stored. To do the same thing you'd have to do a clean install, change all of the global setting, including recreating all of the user accounts and setting all of the user's passwords again, reinstall all of the software, and then transfer over all of the files and put them in the same places they were. No thank you.
As an owner of a Rev A G3, a Rev A iMac, and a pre-AGP G4, I have to say that I haven't found that Apple's gear achieves "decent quality".
Your personal experience is not an objective analysis of how Apple hardware compares to other vendors. All such studies I've seen by reputable companies rate Apple hardware at the top of the heap along with Sony and usually a little better then IBM.
And the problem is that they're not just "not to everyone's taste"... they seem deliberately designed to limit their appeal.
Apple sells about as much hardware as Gateway. Both target certain market segments. Compare the choices you get from Gateway and only Gateway to those you get from Apple. Notice how for particular uses there is not a really good choice?
The way to deal with the "combinations of hardware" problem is to make sure there's at least one product in each category that's expandible[sic].
The market for expandable all-in-one machines and small form factor machines is too tiny to be profitable to them. Their towers are plenty expandable. Their laptops need to be small enough that people can use them as portables. They make sure their pro line has expansion ports and since they are selling as many or more laptops as any PC vendor does right now, I'd say they are giving most people what they want.
Take the Mac mini's internals and put them in a slab with one PCI-E slot and two 3.5" hard drive bays and I'd pay $700 for it.
Yup, you and 500 other guys. The market is not big enough to make them money. If you want expansion slots, pony up for the tower. Otherwise, deal with it.
Maybe I am out of the loop and game programming has indeed turned into some drag and drop excercise, but I am of the old skool where we used to optimize inner loops in assembly to get our pixels onto the screen as fast as possible when me and my friends were coding some crappy little games in high school.
So here's the deal. To make a fun game, you don't need really fast, impressive graphics. You need gameplay. You absolutely need some good coders to develop good gameplay, but you also need people with vision and who know what works. The next two items on the list are graphics (both coding and artwork) and story. Some of the best games of all time are the ones that managed to get all of these components. Some of the worst games of all time have great graphics and coding behind them, but the gameplay and story is a big pile of crap. The thing is, a lot of people recognize that the coding to make good gameplay can be reusable. That is to say, with a good gaming engine, some scripting, artwork, story, and map makers, you can make a really good game without having to do a lot more actual coding. Companies try this and sometimes succeed all the time when they buy access to engines and dev tools others made.
There are a lot of people out there who are talented storytellers, or artists, or just have a really good idea of what makes a fun game, but they don't have a good way to leverage those skills and those skills are often not valued by many of the clueless development houses.
Since they have no chance to get into the regular gaming industry, a lot of amateurs with other pieces of the puzzle (or who think they have them) would like to have access to a chance to contribute. This creates a big market for gaming schools and for easy to use game dev software.
I wish somebody would, but not because I think it'd work... But because I'd like to use it ;)
I've seen similar models work to build mod communities, even around relatively obscure games. Back in the 90s I remember the Macintosh only game "Realmz" which shipped with really cheap dev tools and had a built in service for downloading and selling these new modules. People were happy to pay $15-$30 for more content, some from the original author and some from other people. The key is to build a game that has lots of value in the story and in addictive gameplay. Role-playing style games where you build up characters and inventories are ideal for this. I knew people who installed mac emulators just to play that old tile-based game, because despite not having the most detailed graphics, it was just fun.
The other component to this is that there are lots of open source engine and game projects now. Some of them are pretty cool, but none of them has any real commercial backing or business plan involved. It would be a huge boon to be able to leverage this pool of code and talent and all of it comes off of the cost of developing your for-sale games. You can probably sell modules for such a system for as little as $15 and still make a reasonable profit. And all the time the community will be donating ideas, models, textures, bug fixes, and revenue from the ads on the site.
Another nice aspect of this, is it does not preclude the boxed sale market. There is nothing stopping the maker of one of the modules from packaging the whole engine and their module and shipping it, at which point the game purchaser is subjected to the whole community. It is like free advertising for it.
You are by no means the only one who would really go for a chance to try this out, and even some fairly competent coders would like a chance to build some resume fodder to help them get into the market. Even without any large companies getting on board, I think the original developers combined with the amateur community could make some really good money on this. And if the developers happened to have an easy way to port these to consoles, for a reasonable fee, well that is just icing on the cake.
Right... It's called 'every teenage boy wants to do this with his life.' It's the next generation version of 'rock star.' It also means that not everyone who is 'seriously pursuing this field' is even remotely competent at it. They just want it really bad.
All these fly by night gaming schools are tapping into this market, but there is another way. A few really competent developers could clean up by grabbing one of the open source gaming engines out there, getting some venture capital and building it out into an open source gaming virtual console. Here's the basic idea. You build an open source, cross-platform gaming engine that takes modules, just like neverwinter nights, but a bit more versatile. You build into this a service that allows people to sell and/or give away modules they develop, supported by advertisements. At the same time you build freeware and more comprehensive payware development tools for this engine. You build one game, or maybe half a game including art and the whole shebang as your hook and you give the engine, game and freeware tools away for free. Get it bundled by Windows OEMs and in Linux distros and heck on Apple machines if you can. If you can't, make sure it is a free download everyone knows about.
At this point you have dropped a pile of money on this game/engine and don't have any real return on your investment. This is where the aforementioned market comes in. All the people who want to be game developers will mess around with your free tools and a few will make something worthwhile. A number more will shell out for your professional dev tools. At this point you have a fairly widespread service and will be getting a lot of good press. You have a lot of the work of making a game done for people, so the investment to bring one to market is small. This means companies might consider releasing cheap titles. They will want your dev tools. They may well want improvements to the engine which will benefit you or which they will pay you to make. And who better to hire to do development than the makers and maintainers of the engine?
Throughout all of this you'll be able to undercut other companies developing engines because you are leveraging free work from the open source community. Heck, there are a number of engines now you can leverage. If nothing else you can make and sell more modules, providing low cost games and building brands. If it takes off enough you'll be able to clean up simply on the advertisements on the site and the dev costs will be incidental.
I seriously think this would work, but am way too busy/comfortable to go for it myself. Someone, steal my idea.
Hve[sic] you never heard of possesion[sic] of stolen property? I realize there are differences making the analogy difficult, but there are parrallels[sic] as well. Just because the law says the uploading is the crime, don't count yourself invincible because you only download.
Ummm, what!?!
Just because the law says attacking people is a crime, don't think you're invincible just because you only play baseball with that bat. If you're not copying something you're not violating the copyright and, thus you're not committing a crime. No one is convicted of downloading. Stop spreading this FUD.
Ray tracing also suffers terribly from "jaggies". Edges look bad because rays can just miss an object and cause really bad stepping on the edges of objects.
I know traditional ray-tracers solve this with an anti-aliasing pass, but I thought real-time ray tracers solved this by incorporating a radiacity engine instead.
Effects like focal length, fog, bump mapping etc. cause things to get even more complex. Most pictures rendered with high quality on Blender, POVRay etc. would take minutes if not hours even on a fast / dual core processor.
The only way you'd get 30fps is if cut your ray trace depth to 1 or 2, used a couple of lights, cut the screen res down and forgot about fixing jaggies.
But we're not looking for parity with a professional ray tracing used in film or print. We're looking at parity or improvements upon the quality of video game rendering today, which is nowhere near the that level of photo-realism. They actually claim to have run benchmarks, and given how fast you can render an animation of better quality than you'd see in a video game using Bryce or something and a modern processor, I'm inclined to believe it is becoming feasible.
Oh and find time for all the other things that apps and games must do.
This is where we're coming into a discussion of bottlenecks in such a system. Assume in three years everyone will have a quad-core machine or better. Most games are not CPU bound even today. That means you could have two cores sitting basically idle. If general purpose CPUs can take over the the rendering, you may well have no problem finding the CPU cycles. Then we're talking about memory and disk access as the real bottlenecks and the GPU can be used for putting it all together and applying filter effects and the like.
Will this work? I don't know. Will it work so well that it will beat current rendering tech? Again, I don't know. But I'm not convinced by your arguments that it won't.
All the proprietary hardware companies have been succesful using this model, so naturally it applies to open source software companies.
You just don't get it. IBM is an open source software company. They create tons of OSS code and they use it to make a ton of money selling hardware, services, and in other markets. Think of it this way. What if the union of carpenters and construction workers figured out a way to create better hammers, cheaper than the manufacturing industry can. They did so, and benefited greatly and some of them were getting paid to be the hammer maker at their construction company. You argue," yeah, but they are construction companies not manufacturing companies. No manufacturer can make a profit selling open source hammers." It is beside the point.
Developers are paid and code is written and companies use it because it is cheaper and works better. Everyone is making a profit and for large projects there are teams dedicated to just making that product. Some people work just for that team, making customizations, fixes, providing support, and consulting. They do quite well. If you want to claim they don't qualify as a company, fine. But to argue that companies that are devoted to open source software are not profitable there are about a million easy counter examples. My company produces code for OpenBSD, Linux, and dozens of other open source projects. We all work on salary and all get paid quite well. We're heavily invested in open source code, but we sell complete packages built around it, including hardware, services, support, and some closed source code. We're and open source software company as much as anything else. You just have to be able to comprehend a different kind of business plan.
Why did anyone mod this up? At best it is a straw man argument. At worst it is a troll.
Oh wait, let me guess... "support", right? Oh, sure...
Allow me to translate. The previous poster said that the question was answered over and over again. This poster asserts that the previous poster must have meant that answer was "support," even though that was never mentioned anywhere, and then went on to decry (not debunk he simply makes assertions to the contrary, but does not provide any reasons).
Just in case this last poster was just ignorant and not a troll, allow me to make a quick summary of how OSS fits into the business world. Proprietary software is made by a single company and sold to multiple companies for as much as they can get. A cheaper method is for the companies that want to use software to collaborate on the development (OSS) and each only pays for what they need. In addition to that, they all get access to bug fixes and features someone else needed for free. Sometimes this is done by using internal developers who become experts in the software. Sometimes this is done by hiring outside developers to do the work you need. For projects like Apache, there is a core group of developers paid to make general improvements and to make specific customizations or improvements on commission. Developers are paid for support, customization, new features, and sometimes just given a salary to make general improvements and be an internal expert until something specific is required. The actual code is used to provide services or products to other people.
In this model, the developers have less chance of "making it big" but at the same time they can undercut the costs of the competition and provide a better product and have more widespread adoption of their product, which brings a lot of prestige and can lead to other financial opportunities. This model has only been working for a few decades and is in constant use by IBM, Apple, Cisco, and pretty much any major IT company you can think of, and I've, personally, read explanations not very different from this one a dozen times. Please stop asking this.