You have the right to put it in your car and crank up the volume, for all to hear, but according to the RIAA you can't play it for your online friends.
At least in the UK you have to have a license to play music in a shop or a workplace, otherwise the British media bodies come calling:-(
Evidence from the road by my house suggests that cranking up the volume in your car is still acceptable though;-)
The use of the app store and a locked down (in the case of users without developer licenses!) platform somewhat undermines the usual assumption that by providing the source code anyone has the power to modify the program running on their device. Which is unfortunate and alters the conditions from those that GPL software is usually distributed under, since it's harder for someone to take advantage of that source to modify the app's behaviour or to undercut your price. But that's really a problem with the platform and the app store, which you haven't created. And, at the end of the day, anybody else is still free to pay for the developer license - like you did - then put the resulting work onto app store for free.
Arguably the really question is whether you ought to "compensate" for the deficiencies of the app store (cost as a barrier to entry, devices locked down) by distributing your app for free. I don't see that that's necessary.You have running costs on the server, right? So you're providing a service and it's right that you feel justified in charging for it. Not to mention the understandable wish to make back the money you paid for developer kits and to get compensation for your time.
Also, it's not against the spirit of the GPL to charge for the software, by the FSF / RMS's definition. It might be against the spirit that the original developers intended their contributions to be under but then they should have chosen a different license. Arguably the developer who got in contact with you is - though presumably acting in good faith - the one who truly is violating the spirit of the GPL. Why? Because he's trying to apply additional restrictions which all the other contributors explicitly disallowed when they used the GPL for their own code. He probably doesn't see it that way and I certainly don't think there's any reason to think he's being *bad*. But he is not correct in his reasoning, IMO.
If you really wanted to make a gesture over this issue (though neither the GPL nor ethics would seem to require you to) you could try some of the following: a) donating more code to the original project, ensuring its merged upstream, if you haven't already b) donating money to the project c) provide an alternate apps store download that is free but cannot connect to your Xpilot-iPhone server (then if other people want to provide the service for free they can, whilst your paying customers get to use the service you're providing) d) lower the price (or make it free) when your developer licenses (and, optionally, your time) have been paid for. Making this somewhat like a bounty system, which gets used in OSS anyhow.
c) feels quite impure in some ways, so I'd think a) and b) are probably the appropriate way to go, with d) if you feel extra generous!
When Fedora added btrfs support they didn't allow it as a root filesystem at installation time... unless you passed the special command "icantbelieveitsnotbtr" on the kernel command line;-)
There was some work on making undeletion work with ext4, with support integrated into the filesystem. AFAIK that's not yet merged into Linux but I do remember at least one developer being serious about it I imagine they could do the same with Btrfs, I'd be surprised if they haven't thought about it.
As others have noted, the snapshotting ability of Btrfs mitigates the lack of undelete somewhat but doesn't quite replace it.
Apparently my explanation of versioning wasn't correct - that's not how it happened although my explanation does preserve much of the craziness of the real events;-)
Re:I've been running emacs 23 for 2 years ... sort
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
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· Score: 1
I believe they're intending to move to Bazaar, since that's apparently (whether potentially or actually I am not sure) going to become a GNU project as some point in the future.
My favourite choice for them would have been Mercurial but bzr supports distributed operation and also lightweight, current revision-style checkouts, so it's quite a nice system too.
Re:I've been running emacs 23 for 2 years ... sort
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
·
· Score: 1
Ooops, I stand corrected, thanks. I was dredging that up from somewhere in my longterm memory - I probably actually got it from the Wikipedia article but my memory had apparently got corrupted in the years since;-)
I've been running emacs 23 for 2 years ... sorta
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
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· Score: 3, Interesting
M-x version gives me "GNU Emacs 23.0.0.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.10.6) of 2007-01-18". This is a version I checked out from emacs CVS on that date, compiled with GTK support and antialiasing (at least one, possibly both of which were experimental at the time) and have been using this version ever since. I've been sticking to it because of the antialiasing, basically. Whenever I start it up it displays a warning about how it might be horribly unstable, eat my data, etc.
But I have found it to be remarkably stable - much more so than many / most final releases of software. I can probably count the crashes I've had from it on my fingers - in unary, not binary, for the benefit of any pedants out there. If the final release is at least as good as the random CVS checkout I have then it ought to be pretty good! To be fair it sounds like lots of features have been added since my checkout...
On the basis of my experience I will consider testing CVS versions of emacs in future if they have useful features that I need. Obviously still gotta take care with that vital data when doing so, my good experiences notwithstanding!
On a side note, the emacs versioning system is amusing in itself... IIRC they were numbering the releases 0.x and working up to 1.0 as normal. But it took so many releases that they ended up just dropping the "0." designation and calling it "x" instead. Which is why emacs is at version 23 where vim (on my machine) is only at 7.2 and nano at 2.0.9;-)
Linus is brilliant. He is funny. Most days I really agree with anything he has to say.
However, he has butted heads with people in the past. Perhaps this is just human nature and unavoidable from time to time. Linus isn't perfect, nor always right. I thought he was really unfair to Con Kolivas when he drove Con away.
I remember the mess with Con Kolivas resulting from something vaguely similar: Con was saying that, no, the correct place to fix the problem at hand was in userspace not the scheduler. Linus went a bit crazy and said that Con was refusing to admit a bug existed and that he therefore had the wrong attitude. Fast forward to this discussion with Alan Cox and it comes down to Linus going off the deep end over a discussion about where a bug is.
OK, so it takes strong leadership to keep a big project on track and Linus has had to take a tough line on ABI stuff (and various other things that make life harder for developers) from time-to-time. Usually he's extremely level-headed and pragmatic but every so often he seems to cross the line a bit. But as you say, he's doing a tough job managing lots of people - and he does it all in public for us to scrutinize. He does very well. But in this instance (ditto the incident with CK) he's being unexpectedly unreasonable.
When this originally came up, at least one contributor on the OS News discussion (http://www.osnews.com/story/21882/Microsoft_s_Linux_Kernel_Code_Drop_Result_of_GPL_Violation) of the issue suggested that the GPL code that was being linked to Microsoft's binary blob was *also* Microsoft's code (see http://www.osnews.com/thread?374824 for example). I've not seen a definitive statement from an interested party either supporting or refuting this.
That doesn't contradict the idea that Microsoft was linking its own GPLed code to its own closed code, which would be inconsistent but would be within their rights if they are the copyright holder on both portions.
Of course, it's a different matter if their original GPLed shim contained others' GPLed code. Indeed, if it included Linux Kernel header files then it probably did, in which case it actually would have been violating those developers' copyrights. I don't see how that's worse than the way the NVidia (or any other closed source drivers) work, though - or do they do some cunning / evil trick to get around this situation? Linus has previously said that he thinks binary drivers are acceptable if they were written for another platform first and therefore not a derived work of the kernel - I think his opinion on that is inconsistent and nonsensical but it's easy to imagine that the MS binary portion of the driver was developed for other platforms and therefore believed to be covered by this.
Unlike Nvidia et al, MS has evidently realised that they'd look stupid not to release the code, so whilst they're not whiter-than-white they are actually doing better than some. Of course, they really need to do their best not to look hypocritical about intellectual property.
... because you don't *really* need to know it. In fact, I get the impression you might be less confused if you don't. I've played much of the way through RE4 (before my friend took his Wii back home and I had to stop) and all the way through RE5 several times. The plot presented by RE5 is only confusing in that it's a bit bonkers but really you don't need to follow the details in order to enjoy the main message of the plot, which is "Shoot zombies and evil dudes with shiny teeth".
My general impression of Resident Evil games is that they engineer the plot by pulling out "The Bumper Book of Cliches" and then attempting to cram as many as possible into a short space of time; paradoxically, however, they do this so well that the resulting game is *awesome* instead of awful. My gaming partner and I play a faux drinking game where we shout "chug!" and pretend to knock back a shot every time a game does something cliched, features cliched dialogue, etc. We're shouting chug pretty much all the time when we play RE5.
After a while you find you start saying cliched things yourself as the experience percolates in. My friend cried out "They're attacking us from long range!" and I responded, without thinking about it, "Then lets make it *close range*!", running in with my shotgun. *chug*. Seriously, if the anti-gaming lobby knew it made everything you say come out as a cliche I don't know if they would be hysterically alarmed or hysterically amused.
Thank you for the link! Yes, I've played with Cave9 and liked it, though it was relatively new and basic at the time. I helped them track down a minor bug in an early version because I thought it was a cool project. I had forgotten about it for a while ago and really ought to take another look.
I've been thinking I should either do another blog post or possibly just start a wiki page indexing 3D gravity games. For the relatively few of us who are fans I think it would be quite interesting / useful!
I seem to have ended up at -1, Offtopic, so I guess I must have upset some people. Just thought I'd link to some relevant information that I'd collected and thought might be of interest. The main blog link is about a whole genre of games that were inspired by lander-style physics, ranging throughout various styles and platforms. It happens to be on my site, which doesn't carry any adverts - I did think about posting Anonymous but I rather thought it'd be better / more reasonable to state my interest in the site up-front.
However, I see there's a +4, Insightful one liner post about how awesome the USA is for landing on the moon. If that's/on/ topic, I'm guess I'm glad to be off it;-)
- I should clarify that I meant the sister project to "my" project, not that Flyin' Irons was also my project! Another, very productive, developer has been responsible for pushing Flyin' Irons to a more playable state than my game ever was.
Just realised I phrased that badly - for clarification, the sister project is *not* written by me but by Anthony, the Disintegrator guy! I think he's more a project-finisher than I am:-)
Sorry for the self-promotion but at least there are no ad revenues involved;-)
I wrote a blog entry about some 3D gravity games a while back and it's been enhanced by very useful comments from a user called "roid": http://openlander.wordpress.com/2008/03/25/history-of-3d-gravity-games/ Fans of the genre may be interested. I was thinking about wikifying an index of 3D gravity games. Yes, I wrote a lander-esque game as well, which is the main subject of the blog. It's just a tech demo at the moment, since I've got Real World Work to attend to.
My sister project, Flyin' Irons (a lander racing game set in a world of flying steam irons), is more playable as a game at the moment. The developer has had some problems getting recent Soya builds for Windows, sadly, which is holding him up. http://flyinirons.wordpress.com/
Off topic, the guy who wrote Flyin' Irons also built the world's most advanced / powerful rubber band gun: http://disintegrator.co.uk/
Certain classes of photos (e.g. celebrities) might be lacking but it's hardly true that Wikipedia photos in general are poor. I'm sure the celebrity photos will also improve over time.
Oh dear, another confusing international internet legal kerfuffle. I'm not really clear what jurisdiction the British courts are going to have over this guy.
I'm moderately sympathetic to the NPG in this case - although, as noted, they are government-funded, it is UK taxes that fund it. They're *also* funded by licensing these photographs, AFAIK and by other donations, grants, etc. Given that, I can understand why they want to keep a revenue stream and also why they don't feel the need to provide images free-of-charge to the rest of the world (though it's human culture, so I also think it'd be somewhat unfair to deny the rest of the world access - although they have, evidently, made these pictures available on their website). Given UK law doesn't definitively place these photographs in the public domain, I can see why they think they have a legal leg to stand on - except for the (large) matter of jurisdiction, which I can't understand how they're going to argue / enforce.
Despite all my sympathies for the gallery's predicament, I would *love* to see the EFF come over here and argue the case successfully so that we can set a legal precedent and have a stronger public domain. It's not that I'm against the NPG, it's that I want our laws improved;-)
Also: wouldn't it help if the WMF foundation published the legal threats they'd received? They claim in the blog entry that they were quite aggressive but I've not actually seen the real letters. The letter to the individual contributor seemed quite pleasant and constructive, as legal threats go. Although I guess it's possible that they'd be more formal / aggressive when addressing an "organisation" than an individual.
Aha, having finally found somebody who has actually worked on this stuff, I have a question...
Last time this came up on Wikipedia people seemed to doubt that there was *creativity* as opposed to just skill and time involved in producing an accurate reproduction of a painting, given its 2D. My belief was that, since a painting is actually *not* just a photograph and *is* somewhat 3D due to texture of paints (particularly oil paints) that some subjective and creative work would be required. How much of this is there? Is it a truly creative task, rather than just a technically difficult one to try to represent the painting in a way that is interesting and as true to the original as possible?
Even in US law, as I understand it, a picture of a 3D sculpture is copyrightable due to the artistry of choosing how to present it - camera angles, etc. I don't see much difference in the artistry of choosing a camera angle that accentuates a sculpture's grace and energy and choosing a camera and lighting setup that accentuates the texture of a painting in a way which improves the experience compared to a flat reproduction.
In my opinion, whether an individual image *deserves* the protection of copyright is probably determined by the amount of subjective judgement that went into creating it. If you can write down a precise series of steps that a human or machine could follow to produce images just as good as yours then the images are not a creative work, though the process of determining the steps may have been. If you need to exercise subjective judgement that could never be meaningfully automated or simply written down, then I'd say it's definitely creative. That's not a test that I'd necessarily like to base laws on but I think it's instructive when thinking about the issues.
I'm generally fairly sympathetic to the museum's stance but I do think it's slightly undermined by forbidding photography (as I understand it) and thus holding a "monopoly" on the cultural objects they're acting as custodians for. Equally well, some of their paintings might not physically stand up to even occasional accidental camera flashes over time, so it's understandable if they were a bit nervous about it on preservation grounds.
Worked for me. I bought Halo 1 & 2 second hand, bought Halo 3 new when it was old and therefore cheap anyhow. Paid full whack for Halo Wars and probably will for OSDT and Halo: Reach, so long as the reviews indicate they're up to quality. For franchises I'm less fond of but nevertheless enjoy (e.g. GoW, L4D) I might wait to get the game second hand. If I had to buy *everything* new, I'd buy fewer games and wouldn't be inclined to "try out" franchises.
Another example of a slightly different nature: I bought Assassin's Creed and Crackdown even though some reviews were a bit lukewarm. I wouldn't pay full price for a lukewarm game. Assassin's Creed was sufficiently interesting that I'd like to know where the story goes, making me *more* inclined to buy the sequel, if the reviews are reasonable.
It's like the old argument against piracy - but even more so. A game bought second hand is not necessarily a lost sale, since a) the game might not be *worth* full price to the purchaser b) we don't have infinite money to spend on games. They should concentrate on ways to pull people into a franchise so that they *want* to buy new.
Rumours on Slashdot about ink blot controversy. Talk of fighting amongst Wikipedia editors. They will cry out to me to arbitrate their edit wars. And I will say No.
Because you were participating in the discussion about how to forward local apps onto the network, so I thought further discussion was relevant to you too.
- I deliberately didn't mention Xpra because it's an ugly hack which manages to combine the worst aspects of X11 and VNC.
*shrug* one man's meat is another man's poison. That's one way of looking at it but it also manages to combine some of the strengths of each - rootless operation, simplicity and latency tolerance. You can also upgrade the server without losing your apps.
In my opinion Xpra is an elegant use of existing infrastructure to create a minimal solution to a problem a number of us have. I can run Xpra on my work machine, then connect remotely. Attractive to folks need to remotely access a graphical app without high performance but want a guarantee that a network crash won't kill their app. It's not the only way of doing this but it has simplicity on its side.
Moreover, unlike X protocol, which xmove uses, Xpra's protocol is suitable for high latency links and doesn't require the client machine to have an X server running (c.f. the Windows port).
Horses for courses. I just wouldn't use it for everything is all;-)
The correct way of doing this, which xmove does, is to simply track the very small amount of state that exists for each window and use this in a CreateWindow message to a new server when you want to move windows, and just proxy all other messages directly.
I always liked the idea of xmove but I thought it was hadn't been maintained for a while? Does it actually still work well with modern apps? Do you use it?
They had a crack at introducing moral ambiguity into that when you meet the first little sister - Atlas warns you that there are lives at stake and that the little sister isn't a real child, so you ought to kill her (a monster) so you can survive yourself and save his family. It's not presented as black-and-white which is the best choice in that first decision. Beyond that they didn't make you think about it so much and there was very little penalty to saving them in the rest of the game. They could have worked harder at that aspect.
Slashdot Mirror
You have the right to put it in your car and crank up the volume, for all to hear, but according to the RIAA you can't play it for your online friends.
At least in the UK you have to have a license to play music in a shop or a workplace, otherwise the British media bodies come calling :-(
Evidence from the road by my house suggests that cranking up the volume in your car is still acceptable though ;-)
The FSF/RMS have made statements in the past about charging for GPL stuff being OK. e.g. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
Although you may be justified if you argue that they're stating an interpretation that doesn't carry legal weight.
The use of the app store and a locked down (in the case of users without developer licenses!) platform somewhat undermines the usual assumption that by providing the source code anyone has the power to modify the program running on their device. Which is unfortunate and alters the conditions from those that GPL software is usually distributed under, since it's harder for someone to take advantage of that source to modify the app's behaviour or to undercut your price. But that's really a problem with the platform and the app store, which you haven't created. And, at the end of the day, anybody else is still free to pay for the developer license - like you did - then put the resulting work onto app store for free.
Arguably the really question is whether you ought to "compensate" for the deficiencies of the app store (cost as a barrier to entry, devices locked down) by distributing your app for free. I don't see that that's necessary.You have running costs on the server, right? So you're providing a service and it's right that you feel justified in charging for it. Not to mention the understandable wish to make back the money you paid for developer kits and to get compensation for your time.
Also, it's not against the spirit of the GPL to charge for the software, by the FSF / RMS's definition. It might be against the spirit that the original developers intended their contributions to be under but then they should have chosen a different license. Arguably the developer who got in contact with you is - though presumably acting in good faith - the one who truly is violating the spirit of the GPL. Why? Because he's trying to apply additional restrictions which all the other contributors explicitly disallowed when they used the GPL for their own code. He probably doesn't see it that way and I certainly don't think there's any reason to think he's being *bad*. But he is not correct in his reasoning, IMO.
If you really wanted to make a gesture over this issue (though neither the GPL nor ethics would seem to require you to) you could try some of the following:
a) donating more code to the original project, ensuring its merged upstream, if you haven't already
b) donating money to the project
c) provide an alternate apps store download that is free but cannot connect to your Xpilot-iPhone server (then if other people want to provide the service for free they can, whilst your paying customers get to use the service you're providing)
d) lower the price (or make it free) when your developer licenses (and, optionally, your time) have been paid for. Making this somewhat like a bounty system, which gets used in OSS anyhow.
c) feels quite impure in some ways, so I'd think a) and b) are probably the appropriate way to go, with d) if you feel extra generous!
When Fedora added btrfs support they didn't allow it as a root filesystem at installation time ... unless you passed the special command "icantbelieveitsnotbtr" on the kernel command line ;-)
There was some work on making undeletion work with ext4, with support integrated into the filesystem. AFAIK that's not yet merged into Linux but I do remember at least one developer being serious about it I imagine they could do the same with Btrfs, I'd be surprised if they haven't thought about it.
As others have noted, the snapshotting ability of Btrfs mitigates the lack of undelete somewhat but doesn't quite replace it.
Apparently my explanation of versioning wasn't correct - that's not how it happened although my explanation does preserve much of the craziness of the real events ;-)
Read (and up-mod, if you can) this guys post, he has the story straight:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1320833&cid=28888279
I believe they're intending to move to Bazaar, since that's apparently (whether potentially or actually I am not sure) going to become a GNU project as some point in the future.
My favourite choice for them would have been Mercurial but bzr supports distributed operation and also lightweight, current revision-style checkouts, so it's quite a nice system too.
Ooops, I stand corrected, thanks. I was dredging that up from somewhere in my longterm memory - I probably actually got it from the Wikipedia article but my memory had apparently got corrupted in the years since ;-)
M-x version gives me "GNU Emacs 23.0.0.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.10.6) of 2007-01-18". This is a version I checked out from emacs CVS on that date, compiled with GTK support and antialiasing (at least one, possibly both of which were experimental at the time) and have been using this version ever since. I've been sticking to it because of the antialiasing, basically. Whenever I start it up it displays a warning about how it might be horribly unstable, eat my data, etc.
But I have found it to be remarkably stable - much more so than many / most final releases of software. I can probably count the crashes I've had from it on my fingers - in unary, not binary, for the benefit of any pedants out there. If the final release is at least as good as the random CVS checkout I have then it ought to be pretty good! To be fair it sounds like lots of features have been added since my checkout ...
On the basis of my experience I will consider testing CVS versions of emacs in future if they have useful features that I need. Obviously still gotta take care with that vital data when doing so, my good experiences notwithstanding!
On a side note, the emacs versioning system is amusing in itself ... IIRC they were numbering the releases 0.x and working up to 1.0 as normal. But it took so many releases that they ended up just dropping the "0." designation and calling it "x" instead. Which is why emacs is at version 23 where vim (on my machine) is only at 7.2 and nano at 2.0.9 ;-)
Linus is brilliant. He is funny. Most days I really agree with anything he has to say.
However, he has butted heads with people in the past. Perhaps this is just human nature and unavoidable from time to time. Linus isn't perfect, nor always right. I thought he was really unfair to Con Kolivas when he drove Con away.
I remember the mess with Con Kolivas resulting from something vaguely similar: Con was saying that, no, the correct place to fix the problem at hand was in userspace not the scheduler. Linus went a bit crazy and said that Con was refusing to admit a bug existed and that he therefore had the wrong attitude. Fast forward to this discussion with Alan Cox and it comes down to Linus going off the deep end over a discussion about where a bug is.
OK, so it takes strong leadership to keep a big project on track and Linus has had to take a tough line on ABI stuff (and various other things that make life harder for developers) from time-to-time. Usually he's extremely level-headed and pragmatic but every so often he seems to cross the line a bit. But as you say, he's doing a tough job managing lots of people - and he does it all in public for us to scrutinize. He does very well. But in this instance (ditto the incident with CK) he's being unexpectedly unreasonable.
I was just going to reply and say the same thing as the GP - there is another Alan Cox for FreeBSD.
I have a theory that all OSes have their own Alan Cox but maybe they sometimes use pseudonyms to keep that secret!
When this originally came up, at least one contributor on the OS News discussion (http://www.osnews.com/story/21882/Microsoft_s_Linux_Kernel_Code_Drop_Result_of_GPL_Violation) of the issue suggested that the GPL code that was being linked to Microsoft's binary blob was *also* Microsoft's code (see http://www.osnews.com/thread?374824 for example). I've not seen a definitive statement from an interested party either supporting or refuting this.
The guy who pointed out the violation to Greg KH notes that the driver contained GPL and closed portions, which is not consistent with the terms of the GPL license: http://linux-network-plumber.blogspot.com/2009/07/congratulations-microsoft.html
That doesn't contradict the idea that Microsoft was linking its own GPLed code to its own closed code, which would be inconsistent but would be within their rights if they are the copyright holder on both portions.
Of course, it's a different matter if their original GPLed shim contained others' GPLed code. Indeed, if it included Linux Kernel header files then it probably did, in which case it actually would have been violating those developers' copyrights. I don't see how that's worse than the way the NVidia (or any other closed source drivers) work, though - or do they do some cunning / evil trick to get around this situation? Linus has previously said that he thinks binary drivers are acceptable if they were written for another platform first and therefore not a derived work of the kernel - I think his opinion on that is inconsistent and nonsensical but it's easy to imagine that the MS binary portion of the driver was developed for other platforms and therefore believed to be covered by this.
Unlike Nvidia et al, MS has evidently realised that they'd look stupid not to release the code, so whilst they're not whiter-than-white they are actually doing better than some. Of course, they really need to do their best not to look hypocritical about intellectual property.
... because you don't *really* need to know it. In fact, I get the impression you might be less confused if you don't. I've played much of the way through RE4 (before my friend took his Wii back home and I had to stop) and all the way through RE5 several times. The plot presented by RE5 is only confusing in that it's a bit bonkers but really you don't need to follow the details in order to enjoy the main message of the plot, which is "Shoot zombies and evil dudes with shiny teeth".
My general impression of Resident Evil games is that they engineer the plot by pulling out "The Bumper Book of Cliches" and then attempting to cram as many as possible into a short space of time; paradoxically, however, they do this so well that the resulting game is *awesome* instead of awful. My gaming partner and I play a faux drinking game where we shout "chug!" and pretend to knock back a shot every time a game does something cliched, features cliched dialogue, etc. We're shouting chug pretty much all the time when we play RE5.
After a while you find you start saying cliched things yourself as the experience percolates in. My friend cried out "They're attacking us from long range!" and I responded, without thinking about it, "Then lets make it *close range*!", running in with my shotgun. *chug*. Seriously, if the anti-gaming lobby knew it made everything you say come out as a cliche I don't know if they would be hysterically alarmed or hysterically amused.
Thank you for the link! Yes, I've played with Cave9 and liked it, though it was relatively new and basic at the time. I helped them track down a minor bug in an early version because I thought it was a cool project. I had forgotten about it for a while ago and really ought to take another look.
I've been thinking I should either do another blog post or possibly just start a wiki page indexing 3D gravity games. For the relatively few of us who are fans I think it would be quite interesting / useful!
I seem to have ended up at -1, Offtopic, so I guess I must have upset some people. Just thought I'd link to some relevant information that I'd collected and thought might be of interest. The main blog link is about a whole genre of games that were inspired by lander-style physics, ranging throughout various styles and platforms. It happens to be on my site, which doesn't carry any adverts - I did think about posting Anonymous but I rather thought it'd be better / more reasonable to state my interest in the site up-front.
However, I see there's a +4, Insightful one liner post about how awesome the USA is for landing on the moon. If that's /on/ topic, I'm guess I'm glad to be off it ;-)
"My sister project, Flyin' Irons"
- I should clarify that I meant the sister project to "my" project, not that Flyin' Irons was also my project! Another, very productive, developer has been responsible for pushing Flyin' Irons to a more playable state than my game ever was.
Just realised I phrased that badly - for clarification, the sister project is *not* written by me but by Anthony, the Disintegrator guy! I think he's more a project-finisher than I am :-)
Sorry for the self-promotion but at least there are no ad revenues involved ;-)
I wrote a blog entry about some 3D gravity games a while back and it's been enhanced by very useful comments from a user called "roid": http://openlander.wordpress.com/2008/03/25/history-of-3d-gravity-games/ Fans of the genre may be interested. I was thinking about wikifying an index of 3D gravity games. Yes, I wrote a lander-esque game as well, which is the main subject of the blog. It's just a tech demo at the moment, since I've got Real World Work to attend to.
My sister project, Flyin' Irons (a lander racing game set in a world of flying steam irons), is more playable as a game at the moment. The developer has had some problems getting recent Soya builds for Windows, sadly, which is holding him up.
http://flyinirons.wordpress.com/
Off topic, the guy who wrote Flyin' Irons also built the world's most advanced / powerful rubber band gun: http://disintegrator.co.uk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_pictures
Certain classes of photos (e.g. celebrities) might be lacking but it's hardly true that Wikipedia photos in general are poor. I'm sure the celebrity photos will also improve over time.
Oh dear, another confusing international internet legal kerfuffle. I'm not really clear what jurisdiction the British courts are going to have over this guy.
I'm moderately sympathetic to the NPG in this case - although, as noted, they are government-funded, it is UK taxes that fund it. They're *also* funded by licensing these photographs, AFAIK and by other donations, grants, etc. Given that, I can understand why they want to keep a revenue stream and also why they don't feel the need to provide images free-of-charge to the rest of the world (though it's human culture, so I also think it'd be somewhat unfair to deny the rest of the world access - although they have, evidently, made these pictures available on their website). Given UK law doesn't definitively place these photographs in the public domain, I can see why they think they have a legal leg to stand on - except for the (large) matter of jurisdiction, which I can't understand how they're going to argue / enforce.
Despite all my sympathies for the gallery's predicament, I would *love* to see the EFF come over here and argue the case successfully so that we can set a legal precedent and have a stronger public domain. It's not that I'm against the NPG, it's that I want our laws improved ;-)
Also: wouldn't it help if the WMF foundation published the legal threats they'd received? They claim in the blog entry that they were quite aggressive but I've not actually seen the real letters. The letter to the individual contributor seemed quite pleasant and constructive, as legal threats go. Although I guess it's possible that they'd be more formal / aggressive when addressing an "organisation" than an individual.
Aha, having finally found somebody who has actually worked on this stuff, I have a question...
Last time this came up on Wikipedia people seemed to doubt that there was *creativity* as opposed to just skill and time involved in producing an accurate reproduction of a painting, given its 2D. My belief was that, since a painting is actually *not* just a photograph and *is* somewhat 3D due to texture of paints (particularly oil paints) that some subjective and creative work would be required. How much of this is there? Is it a truly creative task, rather than just a technically difficult one to try to represent the painting in a way that is interesting and as true to the original as possible?
Even in US law, as I understand it, a picture of a 3D sculpture is copyrightable due to the artistry of choosing how to present it - camera angles, etc. I don't see much difference in the artistry of choosing a camera angle that accentuates a sculpture's grace and energy and choosing a camera and lighting setup that accentuates the texture of a painting in a way which improves the experience compared to a flat reproduction.
In my opinion, whether an individual image *deserves* the protection of copyright is probably determined by the amount of subjective judgement that went into creating it. If you can write down a precise series of steps that a human or machine could follow to produce images just as good as yours then the images are not a creative work, though the process of determining the steps may have been. If you need to exercise subjective judgement that could never be meaningfully automated or simply written down, then I'd say it's definitely creative. That's not a test that I'd necessarily like to base laws on but I think it's instructive when thinking about the issues.
I'm generally fairly sympathetic to the museum's stance but I do think it's slightly undermined by forbidding photography (as I understand it) and thus holding a "monopoly" on the cultural objects they're acting as custodians for. Equally well, some of their paintings might not physically stand up to even occasional accidental camera flashes over time, so it's understandable if they were a bit nervous about it on preservation grounds.
Worked for me. I bought Halo 1 & 2 second hand, bought Halo 3 new when it was old and therefore cheap anyhow. Paid full whack for Halo Wars and probably will for OSDT and Halo: Reach, so long as the reviews indicate they're up to quality. For franchises I'm less fond of but nevertheless enjoy (e.g. GoW, L4D) I might wait to get the game second hand. If I had to buy *everything* new, I'd buy fewer games and wouldn't be inclined to "try out" franchises.
Another example of a slightly different nature: I bought Assassin's Creed and Crackdown even though some reviews were a bit lukewarm. I wouldn't pay full price for a lukewarm game. Assassin's Creed was sufficiently interesting that I'd like to know where the story goes, making me *more* inclined to buy the sequel, if the reviews are reasonable.
It's like the old argument against piracy - but even more so. A game bought second hand is not necessarily a lost sale, since a) the game might not be *worth* full price to the purchaser b) we don't have infinite money to spend on games. They should concentrate on ways to pull people into a franchise so that they *want* to buy new.
Rumours on Slashdot about ink blot controversy. Talk of fighting amongst Wikipedia editors. They will cry out to me to arbitrate their edit wars. And I will say No.
Hurm.
I'm not sure why you're replying to me
Because you were participating in the discussion about how to forward local apps onto the network, so I thought further discussion was relevant to you too.
- I deliberately didn't mention Xpra because it's an ugly hack which manages to combine the worst aspects of X11 and VNC.
*shrug* one man's meat is another man's poison. That's one way of looking at it but it also manages to combine some of the strengths of each - rootless operation, simplicity and latency tolerance. You can also upgrade the server without losing your apps.
In my opinion Xpra is an elegant use of existing infrastructure to create a minimal solution to a problem a number of us have. I can run Xpra on my work machine, then connect remotely. Attractive to folks need to remotely access a graphical app without high performance but want a guarantee that a network crash won't kill their app. It's not the only way of doing this but it has simplicity on its side.
Moreover, unlike X protocol, which xmove uses, Xpra's protocol is suitable for high latency links and doesn't require the client machine to have an X server running (c.f. the Windows port).
Horses for courses. I just wouldn't use it for everything is all ;-)
The correct way of doing this, which xmove does, is to simply track the very small amount of state that exists for each window and use this in a CreateWindow message to a new server when you want to move windows, and just proxy all other messages directly.
I always liked the idea of xmove but I thought it was hadn't been maintained for a while? Does it actually still work well with modern apps? Do you use it?
SPOILERS ahead - if anyone cares.
Re the good vs bad choice ...
They had a crack at introducing moral ambiguity into that when you meet the first little sister - Atlas warns you that there are lives at stake and that the little sister isn't a real child, so you ought to kill her (a monster) so you can survive yourself and save his family. It's not presented as black-and-white which is the best choice in that first decision. Beyond that they didn't make you think about it so much and there was very little penalty to saving them in the rest of the game. They could have worked harder at that aspect.