Thank god NYT has hired a reviewer who actually knows his shit and can tell the difference between a bad film and a bad idea. I'm not in the US, and haven't read this paper before, but I'm pretty impressed. Identifying the ideas from the direction is more than I generally expect of the kind of low level journalistic goon hired to write reviews of tiny political documentaries.
FFmpeg's lavc/lame is probably best (currently; the xiph.org stuff isn't quite done yet imo, although functional), but RMS is too public a figure to break the law, so theora/vorbis would be his choice.
It's only "spin" if you're portraying a fact inncorrectly. These are both opinions on the situation, thus, neither can be spin. They _can_ be lies though.
You had a point in my eyes, but you were so eager to fight those damn groupthinkers with the latest Times coloumnist dictionary that you really lost it.
I don't think thats an issue at all; most users of GNU/Linux would hardly care.
Even so, to address your point, there are many examples of large it companies using GNU/Linux; Google is a good example. Lots and lots of linux servers everywhere. As long as they put the real Ubuntu on Dell's, and not some crappy Dellisation of it, I think we can sleep easy.:)
Parent: "There isn't a free C/C++ compiler to use to compile my favourite programs on Win32."
You: "We have C#, J# and VB!"
Few people wh have used unix are willing to put up with any of these closed languages. They want a C/C++ compiler. They might want Ada. Microsoft provides none of these free. None of their compilers work on other operating systems. None of their languages work on other systems. See the problem?
The whole point of Free Software is helping your neighbor, and that's exactly what the MythTv guys are doing. Hopefully businesses will eventually realise the importance of this software and help fund it.
That's exactly what has happened in the past with successful work; Linus was hired by a consortium funded my large companies. Stallman is given MIT university grants (AFAIK). The original gaim developer was hired by Google. There are many, many other examples
Often times, these projects help the developer through job offers, or sponsorship from profiting parties. While there aren't any billionaires yet (and there probably never will be) the developers often do profit, though in the longer term. They do it without betraying the community, and by giving their stuff away for free.
Re:Sounds like the manufacturers fault
on
Viiv Falls Flat
·
· Score: 1
You right, of course.
Most of these features will eventually make their way into the standard machines people are buying. I really don't get why intel thought this was gonna be some revolution; it's not; it's pretty much just a nice way to do some media stuff.
Ignoring the example of Maddonna in the summary; this is most definatley a good thing!
Artists are, generally, getting completely fucked by the organisers with tours. Currently it's a case of "Do tours to sell records"; this needs to change. P2P allows people to hear the songs beforehand; so tours can be done for profit. Cut out the bullshit networking middlemen and this has the potential to be a very very good thing for music in general.
Release music to everyone via gnutella/http
Stronger fanbase
Stronger fanbase willing to pay more for the tickets
No fucking agent ripping the band off
Profit!!!;)
I don't really give a shit about the kind of big name/major label artists, but this would really help smaller bands get a bigger fanbase quickly. Genre is irrelevant: all DIY ethic bands will benefit from this. Local events in my area normally charge between £3-£5 on entry, normally for a 5 band line up (currently, the local councils dumbfuck bylaws mean we have to end at 11pm; we could probably go on to 1am or later if we didn't have this). CD's are normally £4.
It's probably more expensive where you are; life is very cheap here. Even so, if I knew all the bands were good, and I had listened to their shit before hand, I'd be willing to pay up to £15 (maybe £20 if it was a real favourite of mine). Shirts would probably also sell well (i find that the percieved value of the shirt is far greater if it is of a well known band in the local community); so the prices of those could go up, maybe to £7-£9.
Consider that probably around 150-350 people turn up; you could be looking at £3750 a night gross profit (based on 250 people * £15). Considering that people currently make about £250 a night net profit (venue is ~£150). These numbers are probably pretty fudged, considering that every fucker and their mother taxes the door sales tin on their way out. Each of the 3 or 4 venues here currently do this 3, maybe 4 times a week (though, 1/2 it's the venue that organises it themselves - cider sales tend to sky rocket when shows are on).
I'd happy run a bittorrent tracker for every disc of every band in the county out of my attic; hell, I'd probably do it for free. It's easy to teach people to use Bram's client; we could just link off of our myspace.com/*. People are nice, and I doubt we'd have a problem with seeds.
I really wish the smaller, more localised bands would get their fucking act together and release all their stuff to everyone. A decent evangalisation program from fans and the band could really allow them to actually make a profit. We've been doing this out of pocket for too long.
On reading though that again, I realised that I was using "they" to refer to Apple, when in fact, grammatically, it was representing OO.o. Another human here;).
There are significant discrepancies between Tienamman Square and Iraq, especially in that context.
You're right in some ways...
And while the fact that some pretty unaccpetable things have been done by our government, they are generally not allowed to propogate, and are rarely sanctioned by law. While this wire-tapping and PATRIOT act nonsense has some strong criticisms against it, I think that the fact that you are so willing and able to criticize your own country disproves your own argument.
...and wrong in others.
The fact that he is so able to to criticise his own government doesn't really mean anything. Freedom of speech generally stops you being a bad country; but it doesn't make you a good one. Iraq is a valid issue; many think the case for war was a lie, and mismanagement during and after the war has lead to a huge mass of issues that I'd rather not get into.
Let's also not get into the number of...interesting...choices that have been made in the formation of the government; it's almost as if the USA has taken steps to make sure that the parlimentary protocol favours federalist, pro-american, business lovers have gotten into power. It's not altogether strange that this has lead to civil war almost immediately. It's hard to tell if the US wants to get friendly, smiling, suit-wearing Iraqis in to power, or whether it just wants to create enough disagreement so as to discredit the whole thing.
I often find local machine shops give very good service. There's one in my area (Millenium Computers - Northants UK) which has given me really good service, both in helping with a strange hardware problem in my parents machine, and with helping my build a nice Unix box.
Personally, I haven't experience much rudeness on irc, except for a couple of times on #gentoo @ freenode, and it was quickly slapped down by people there.
The major exception to this has been when I've been in windows-scene channels. Quite a few bad experiences there; probably just a couple of bad places really.
The reason people look for help on irc: because people offer it. I used to help out on the #azureus and #azureus-support channels; pretty much mundane stuff like helping people get around their firewalls etc. Nowadays I normally sit on my LUG's irc channel, and we're all for helping people. Sometimes I also give a little help on issues I can solve on #debian and #gentoo. IRC is a good way to help people; it has properties very different to a forum or a mailing list, and these can be very useful in helping people sort out issues.
Often some people have rudeness to deal with because they're demanding attention for a particular situation. This wasn't really the case with the (great?)grandparent. Timecops problem does seem to be a bad experience with #linux-ha. Perhaps he could have tried a mailing list (often, mailing lists offer a better response rate with smaller projects/groups); I'm not looking at the log myself, so I really can't judge what the situation was like. I mean no offence, but I really am not going to take one disgrunted user's bad experience with a channel as godsend.
The best advice I can give to anyone is to read Eric Raymond's Howto Ask Questions The Smart Way. In my (and many other peoples) opinion, that document is definitive. Make sure you read it before you post.
Anti-trust isn't very sketchy at all; as far as I know, it's pretty much set in stone in the EU courts. There's a history of precedent, and the EU courts are in a pretty strong position. It's only by having a rock solid case that the EU courts are really able to nail a powerful company like MS.
That doesn't mean I think Anti-Trusts are a good thing; IMO they're a violation of freedom to do business as one pleases; one of the EU's core values. Microsoft are definatley being abusive of their monopoly; but that shouldn't be a crime. It would help the whole situation a lot more if government hadn't made laws respecting IP; then MS would have never gotten big, and the playing field would be level.
OpenOffice.org also does not run natively on Mac OS X. There is a clunky X11 version which is slow and horrible. I've heard of Koffice running on OS X but not seen it working myself.
The quicker they open all their code, the quicker people are going to do it. FOSS people are generally only interested in helping people who reciprocate.
C'mon now, there's reasonable consensus about what innovation is and isn't.
The Materia system and the Sphere Grid were merely new ways to get said spells You can hardly say that Square have avoided making a quick buck (FFX-2) or using the series' name to promote games seeming unrelated (FFXI). How long did it take for Square to drop the prerendering technique? Unless FFXII releases between the time I type this and the time I click submit, they haven't. That doesn't mean I won't play it sometime (generally, I don't play until emulators are functional), but let's not pretend that it's changed.
Comparing Black and White to Catz/Dogz is silly. You could argue that, but you'd look a fool.
Fable did include a reasonable amount of new concepts and ideas over and above what Rune offered; Rune wasn't nearly of the size or scope of Fable (although I did enjoy it). Rune was simply a 3D hack ans slash; Fable really was more than that.
I disagree with completely, I'm afraid. I think it's pretty reasonable to look at which games have enhanced the industry; you name two yourself in your closing statement (Doom and The Sims).
Also, stating you are a professional game developer doesn't really back up your arguements when they main (and far as I can see, only) game you develop is one you purchased from someone else. Excuse me while I scoff.
She displays a reasonable grip of the subject; but drawns conclusions that are redundant. It's fairly obvious that Microsofts' large install base makes it difficult for new browsers. There's already been many scientific studies that have shown this; one interview with a single investigator of little practical experience (it's mainly a way of putting an opinion column out in this case) means fuck all in the grand scheme of things.
Pretty much, the sum total of everything in this article was;
Late entries in markets with a strong position can displace weaker entrants.
New entries after this that have little to no resources find it difficult to displace big, powerful companies with a good position and massive market share.
Holy fuck! I've discovered nothing important! I better pull some serious sounding implications out of my arse, pronto!
You mean big companies generally have the advantage over small companies and charity efforts?! I must invesigate this further!
This wasn't worth a mention on slashdot. Pai-Ling Yin does have an impressive CV, but she is relating fuck all in terms of actual fresh knowledge.
There is a massive difference between SMBW and SM64, or FF3 and FFX. Japanese franchises reuse characters and basic genre elements (i.e. platformer, RPG, etc), but make drastically different games.
What are you talking about? Final Fantasy has deviated little since FF1; I would know, having played every single game. The biggest change happened in FF2 (japanese numbering); where characters were plot driven, rather than user driven. The battle system is almost exactly the same, and while there are little changes such as the esper system, materia system or the sphere grid the basic features for the games are exactly the same. Random battles, spells and bosses.
Super Mario is, again, another very conservative series. Gameplay has changed little; it's pretty much been a 3D version of the original NES Mario games. The biggest change here was moving to 3D; and it didn't drastically effect the basic gameplay principles.
Japanese developers do innovate more; thats almost certain (though that's not to say I prefer them in particular) but you just named two of the worst examples of innovation.
Innovation isn't brought from one particular area; thats just foolishness and Nintendo/Sony/Sega fanboyism. The Western developers have brought alot of new ideas to the table, and it's ignorant to say otherwise. Deus Ex, Fable and Black and White are reasonable examples.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank god NYT has hired a reviewer who actually knows his shit and can tell the difference between a bad film and a bad idea. I'm not in the US, and haven't read this paper before, but I'm pretty impressed. Identifying the ideas from the direction is more than I generally expect of the kind of low level journalistic goon hired to write reviews of tiny political documentaries.
FFmpeg's lavc/lame is probably best (currently; the xiph.org stuff isn't quite done yet imo, although functional), but RMS is too public a figure to break the law, so theora/vorbis would be his choice.
If you remove the v and switch the i and the r, you'll get it a lot faster. And you'll have freedom too.
Has everyone's perception of value been altered by p2p downloads, cracked software and other Internet-rendered amenities?
Value is in the eye of the beholder. It's probably been more affected by record companies jacking up cd prices.
"Spin works both ways."
It's only "spin" if you're portraying a fact inncorrectly. These are both opinions on the situation, thus, neither can be spin. They _can_ be lies though.
You had a point in my eyes, but you were so eager to fight those damn groupthinkers with the latest Times coloumnist dictionary that you really lost it.
No, it's just sick when you manipulate the legal system to determine whether someone is innocent or guilty.
This is related to unix; I'm talking about Free Software. Downloadable binaries aren't the same.
I don't think thats an issue at all; most users of GNU/Linux would hardly care.
:)
Even so, to address your point, there are many examples of large it companies using GNU/Linux; Google is a good example. Lots and lots of linux servers everywhere. As long as they put the real Ubuntu on Dell's, and not some crappy Dellisation of it, I think we can sleep easy.
Parent: "There isn't a free C/C++ compiler to use to compile my favourite programs on Win32."
You: "We have C#, J# and VB!"
Few people wh have used unix are willing to put up with any of these closed languages. They want a C/C++ compiler. They might want Ada. Microsoft provides none of these free. None of their compilers work on other operating systems. None of their languages work on other systems. See the problem?
We all knew that.
The whole point of Free Software is helping your neighbor, and that's exactly what the MythTv guys are doing. Hopefully businesses will eventually realise the importance of this software and help fund it.
That's exactly what has happened in the past with successful work; Linus was hired by a consortium funded my large companies. Stallman is given MIT university grants (AFAIK). The original gaim developer was hired by Google. There are many, many other examples
Often times, these projects help the developer through job offers, or sponsorship from profiting parties. While there aren't any billionaires yet (and there probably never will be) the developers often do profit, though in the longer term. They do it without betraying the community, and by giving their stuff away for free.
You right, of course.
Most of these features will eventually make their way into the standard machines people are buying. I really don't get why intel thought this was gonna be some revolution; it's not; it's pretty much just a nice way to do some media stuff.
1.50? You don't even have to go that low.
Yes you do. This is China. You know, the place that made your trainers?
Artists are, generally, getting completely fucked by the organisers with tours. Currently it's a case of "Do tours to sell records"; this needs to change. P2P allows people to hear the songs beforehand; so tours can be done for profit. Cut out the bullshit networking middlemen and this has the potential to be a very very good thing for music in general.
I don't really give a shit about the kind of big name/major label artists, but this would really help smaller bands get a bigger fanbase quickly. Genre is irrelevant: all DIY ethic bands will benefit from this. Local events in my area normally charge between £3-£5 on entry, normally for a 5 band line up (currently, the local councils dumbfuck bylaws mean we have to end at 11pm; we could probably go on to 1am or later if we didn't have this). CD's are normally £4.
It's probably more expensive where you are; life is very cheap here. Even so, if I knew all the bands were good, and I had listened to their shit before hand, I'd be willing to pay up to £15 (maybe £20 if it was a real favourite of mine). Shirts would probably also sell well (i find that the percieved value of the shirt is far greater if it is of a well known band in the local community); so the prices of those could go up, maybe to £7-£9.
Consider that probably around 150-350 people turn up; you could be looking at £3750 a night gross profit (based on 250 people * £15). Considering that people currently make about £250 a night net profit (venue is ~£150). These numbers are probably pretty fudged, considering that every fucker and their mother taxes the door sales tin on their way out. Each of the 3 or 4 venues here currently do this 3, maybe 4 times a week (though, 1/2 it's the venue that organises it themselves - cider sales tend to sky rocket when shows are on).
I'd happy run a bittorrent tracker for every disc of every band in the county out of my attic; hell, I'd probably do it for free. It's easy to teach people to use Bram's client; we could just link off of our myspace.com/*. People are nice, and I doubt we'd have a problem with seeds.
I really wish the smaller, more localised bands would get their fucking act together and release all their stuff to everyone. A decent evangalisation program from fans and the band could really allow them to actually make a profit. We've been doing this out of pocket for too long.
They was meant to be apple.
;).
On reading though that again, I realised that I was using "they" to refer to Apple, when in fact, grammatically, it was representing OO.o. Another human here
There are significant discrepancies between Tienamman Square and Iraq, especially in that context.
...and wrong in others.
You're right in some ways...
And while the fact that some pretty unaccpetable things have been done by our government, they are generally not allowed to propogate, and are rarely sanctioned by law. While this wire-tapping and PATRIOT act nonsense has some strong criticisms against it, I think that the fact that you are so willing and able to criticize your own country disproves your own argument.
The fact that he is so able to to criticise his own government doesn't really mean anything. Freedom of speech generally stops you being a bad country; but it doesn't make you a good one. Iraq is a valid issue; many think the case for war was a lie, and mismanagement during and after the war has lead to a huge mass of issues that I'd rather not get into.
Let's also not get into the number of...interesting...choices that have been made in the formation of the government; it's almost as if the USA has taken steps to make sure that the parlimentary protocol favours federalist, pro-american, business lovers have gotten into power. It's not altogether strange that this has lead to civil war almost immediately. It's hard to tell if the US wants to get friendly, smiling, suit-wearing Iraqis in to power, or whether it just wants to create enough disagreement so as to discredit the whole thing.
I often find local machine shops give very good service. There's one in my area (Millenium Computers - Northants UK) which has given me really good service, both in helping with a strange hardware problem in my parents machine, and with helping my build a nice Unix box.
Personally, I haven't experience much rudeness on irc, except for a couple of times on #gentoo @ freenode, and it was quickly slapped down by people there.
The major exception to this has been when I've been in windows-scene channels. Quite a few bad experiences there; probably just a couple of bad places really.
The reason people look for help on irc: because people offer it. I used to help out on the #azureus and #azureus-support channels; pretty much mundane stuff like helping people get around their firewalls etc. Nowadays I normally sit on my LUG's irc channel, and we're all for helping people. Sometimes I also give a little help on issues I can solve on #debian and #gentoo. IRC is a good way to help people; it has properties very different to a forum or a mailing list, and these can be very useful in helping people sort out issues.
Often some people have rudeness to deal with because they're demanding attention for a particular situation. This wasn't really the case with the (great?)grandparent. Timecops problem does seem to be a bad experience with #linux-ha. Perhaps he could have tried a mailing list (often, mailing lists offer a better response rate with smaller projects/groups); I'm not looking at the log myself, so I really can't judge what the situation was like. I mean no offence, but I really am not going to take one disgrunted user's bad experience with a channel as godsend.
The best advice I can give to anyone is to read Eric Raymond's Howto Ask Questions The Smart Way. In my (and many other peoples) opinion, that document is definitive. Make sure you read it before you post.
That seems very sketchy from a legal standpoint.
Anti-trust isn't very sketchy at all; as far as I know, it's pretty much set in stone in the EU courts. There's a history of precedent, and the EU courts are in a pretty strong position. It's only by having a rock solid case that the EU courts are really able to nail a powerful company like MS.
That doesn't mean I think Anti-Trusts are a good thing; IMO they're a violation of freedom to do business as one pleases; one of the EU's core values. Microsoft are definatley being abusive of their monopoly; but that shouldn't be a crime. It would help the whole situation a lot more if government hadn't made laws respecting IP; then MS would have never gotten big, and the playing field would be level.
OpenOffice.org also does not run natively on Mac OS X. There is a clunky X11 version which is slow and horrible. I've heard of Koffice running on OS X but not seen it working myself.
The quicker they open all their code, the quicker people are going to do it. FOSS people are generally only interested in helping people who reciprocate.
C'mon now, there's reasonable consensus about what innovation is and isn't.
The Materia system and the Sphere Grid were merely new ways to get said spells You can hardly say that Square have avoided making a quick buck (FFX-2) or using the series' name to promote games seeming unrelated (FFXI). How long did it take for Square to drop the prerendering technique? Unless FFXII releases between the time I type this and the time I click submit, they haven't. That doesn't mean I won't play it sometime (generally, I don't play until emulators are functional), but let's not pretend that it's changed.
Comparing Black and White to Catz/Dogz is silly. You could argue that, but you'd look a fool.
Fable did include a reasonable amount of new concepts and ideas over and above what Rune offered; Rune wasn't nearly of the size or scope of Fable (although I did enjoy it). Rune was simply a 3D hack ans slash; Fable really was more than that.
I disagree with completely, I'm afraid. I think it's pretty reasonable to look at which games have enhanced the industry; you name two yourself in your closing statement (Doom and The Sims).
Also, stating you are a professional game developer doesn't really back up your arguements when they main (and far as I can see, only) game you develop is one you purchased from someone else. Excuse me while I scoff.
Thank god. You thought exactly what I did. This was a pointless piece of opinion, from an academic of no real note.
Pretty much, the sum total of everything in this article was;
You mean big companies generally have the advantage over small companies and charity efforts?! I must invesigate this further!
This wasn't worth a mention on slashdot. Pai-Ling Yin does have an impressive CV, but she is relating fuck all in terms of actual fresh knowledge.
What do you mean? NetBSD _does_ run on these macs.
There is a massive difference between SMBW and SM64, or FF3 and FFX. Japanese franchises reuse characters and basic genre elements (i.e. platformer, RPG, etc), but make drastically different games.
What are you talking about? Final Fantasy has deviated little since FF1; I would know, having played every single game. The biggest change happened in FF2 (japanese numbering); where characters were plot driven, rather than user driven. The battle system is almost exactly the same, and while there are little changes such as the esper system, materia system or the sphere grid the basic features for the games are exactly the same. Random battles, spells and bosses.
Super Mario is, again, another very conservative series. Gameplay has changed little; it's pretty much been a 3D version of the original NES Mario games. The biggest change here was moving to 3D; and it didn't drastically effect the basic gameplay principles.
Japanese developers do innovate more; thats almost certain (though that's not to say I prefer them in particular) but you just named two of the worst examples of innovation.
Innovation isn't brought from one particular area; thats just foolishness and Nintendo/Sony/Sega fanboyism. The Western developers have brought alot of new ideas to the table, and it's ignorant to say otherwise. Deus Ex, Fable and Black and White are reasonable examples.