Having the browser do spelling correction is not something I have a real problem with.
Verisign was a big problem because it was screwing with important mechanisms that people rely on. Having a web browser do this may be:
* a violation of your privacy
* providing valuable marketing data to Microsoft
* An attempt to squeeze Google out of the market by taking advantage of the fact that by default, Microsoft controls whatever gets entered in the URL bar.
* Not likely to be that helpful.
* Promote misspelling and typing. If you never get any negative feedback, you never learn the correct spelling -- from your standpoint, the alternate spelling *is* correct and took you to the right website. I suspect that widespread use of Word AutoCorrect is the single greatest driver of people being unable to avoid typing "teh".
However, this at least doesn't break other people's systems.
The problem is that this system is targeted at terrorism, but with the patriot act, it allows all this power to actively be used against americans.
History teaches us that this should not be a surprise. Give the federal government excessive police powers ("But we need to hunt *communists*!") and they *will* abuse it.
Hitler was ahead of his time. We already tried claiming that we needed expanded police powers to hunt "communists". Now we're claiming that we need them to hunt "terrorists". Hitler just took the Reichstag fire and demanded more powers because he needed to hunt "communist terrorists".
Apparently not that many, because there are hundreds or thousands of GPL game projects on SourceForge, and most of them are dead (or never really got started in the first place) because there weren't enough people to make them. Surely some of them had to be good ideas!
Consider the following points:
* I think that a lot of people that want to write games are younger folks -- the idea of writing a game is one of the things that I remember people doing in high school when they learned to code. These folks have less experience to draw on, and possibly a harder time with project management issues. If a project is your first, you have to make all your stumbles and do your learning on it...and so there are probably a lot of games out there that go unfinished. Also, a lot of these folks go off to or leave college, and it drastically affects their schedule.
* One of the largest motivators for open source is that a hacker is building something that *he can use*. Yes, peer approval and resume-building and a feeling of helping someone out or fighting against an objectionable closed-source company are all nice, but at the end of the day, there are a *lot* of (and really good) development tools written by open source folks, and few educational games for five-year-olds (yes, I know that there are some projects along those lines). Many, many games can be played through once or twice, and then the replay value fades. As this happens, the hacker can't enjoy using the software that he's writing, and his interest fades.
The open source games that have done well have one very noticable characteristic -- they all have extremely high replay value, much more so than almost any commercial games. People can and have played games like NetHack or ToME for far more hours than just about any commercial games. There are open source card games, and board games. Most open-source games have a randomized element, or are played against other players, so that they continue to be a challenge. I can think of almost zero plot-based open source games that have done well (text-based interactive fiction being a notable exception, and I think that this is more due to the large pool of potential IF authors and the reduced amount of content that must be produced). Plot-based games lose much of their charm after the first time through, so OSS folks can't really enjoy their own game.
* Artists aren't rich. Programmers are, by and large, currently in heavy demand. This means that they can get away with working shorter hours and making plenty of money. They have more potential free time to run out and simply give away on free games.
If you do graphics work, things are, as I understand it, more competitive. One (traditional media) artist that I know of has to work a number of jobs to make ends meet -- I'm sure that if she didn't have to take care of her expenses, she'd love to donate her time.
I've no idea where sound engineering work comes in.
* Game content is less fun than game code. This is a guess on my part, but if I wanted to do some graphics work, I think that I'd rather try out a bunch of my own ideas. It has to be much less fun to, say, draw fifty frames of some character to obtain smooth animation.
Hence, we have plenty of OSS game engines, but less free content.
* Game content is less interchangeable than game code. OSS projects generally have code contributions from many, many people, and are patched together by a maintainer. People lose interest or have increased time demands and stop working on the project, and other people become interested or have a use for the code and start contributing patches. This works well for code. The user doesn't know how many people have worked on the code, because the coders don't have a user-visible style. I don't know whether Joe Hacker has a clever strategy for traversing linked lists when I use software. As long as my softwar
Apparently not that many, because there are hundreds or thousands of GPL game projects on SourceForge, and most of them are dead (or never really got started in the first place) because there weren't enough people to make them. Surely some of them had to be good ideas!
Marketing is one big one. Have you played Battle for Wesnoth? HoMM and similar series would be the closest commercial equivalent, and Wesnoth is at least in the same neighborhood in the content arena. Its gameplay is pretty popular.
Everyone I know that has tried Wesnoth has liked it...but they hadn't heard about it.
I mean, there's no reason whatsoever that the next Counterstrike couldn't be built on Cube or the GPL'd Quake 2 source... so why isn't anyone doing it?
Quake 2 *source* does not come with the textures and so forth, which are still under copyright (I'm not complaining -- I think that this is a pretty good system). If you mod for the current, commercial Quake, you have a set of graphics and audio all ready for you, and you can work on high-level gameplay issues.
Suppose I hire the kind of people who are creative enough to create a good game, and then I hire people that are able to code that creativity into a functioning product. Isn't this a much better model than hiring 50 super-coders to bust out YAJMF? (Yet Another John Madden Football) Game.
Not if what your audience wants is football games, no, that's not a very good allocation of resources.:-)
(Disclaimer: I don't work in the games industry. This is speculation.)
So what is the solution, besides scaling back the size of games?
Doing games reminds me of doing graphic artwork. A lot of people want to be involved, because they can try out their ideas and the end result is entertaining. However, in graphics, one guy can try out his own ideas. If you want to make a full-blown game, you need more than one person to perform all the implementation work to try out the set of that one person's ideas. That means that there's no way for that one person to be as creative as he wants.
The solution is better game-building tools and toolkits. Game development companies all seem to reimplement their own graphics engines, for example. That may be cool if you're a programmer with an interest in seeing new, pretty things, but frankly...writing code to cleverly do level-of-detail -- the same thing that's been done four hundred times before -- drives up the cost in human labor to produce a game.
So my first guess would be to use existing libraries as much as possible. If you want to do game design, see if you can avoid doing low-level work as much as possible. Use Crystal Space or some other pre-existing graphics engine. There are *plenty* of libre and gratis graphics engines out there, and frankly, the player's experience is simply not improved that much more by a 10% improvement in how many polygons you can put on the screen with a given number of CPU cycles. Sure, if you're making a content-laden game, you want your game to look unique -- but you can do that by writing a small amount of high-level code to spit out particles flying out along a differently-shaped path, rather than building yet another particle engine.
Same thing goes for sound. I doubt that OpenAL in and of itself can be used as a full-blown game sound engine, but it's probably a pretty worthwhile foundation at least. I would assume that there are some gratis and libre game sound engines built on OpenAL, but a quick search of freshmeat didn't seem to turn anything up.
If your game fits into one of a certain set of games, there is already a game framework with all this done for you already. If you're writing a shooter, there are scads of Quake-type engines available (and game developers *have* been using these). I'm unaware of any major adventure game or RPG engines that are freely available and support all the features that current games are being released with.
As for content -- artwork and audio -- this I'm totally in the dark about. I would assume that there is some sort of archive of intended-for-game-use content that someone sells (and probably even good-quality gratis stuff out there somewhere), but I'm not aware of any such. I should ideally be able to, if I add a cat to my game, be able to search for "meow", get back a bunch of audio files, try them out rapidly, and then simply add the one I want into my game.
Modelling -- again, I'm not familiar with what resources are out there, though I have seen gratis archives of models. I think that rapid modelling is one of the areas that software developers could vastly improve. Right now, when I think of a "building", I need to sit down and start modelling, and even if I'm good, it takes a while to build such a thing. "Buildings" are common things to make. Really, modelling software should have vast amounts of templates such that they can easily build a stock building with nothing more than a "create templates.skycraper" command or a menu choice, and then allow high-level changes to various parameters -- window shapes, water stains, grime, etc. Terrain modellers exist -- I was quite impressed with how much Bryce sped up terrain modelling, and I'm sure that there are probably better terrain modelers available (though a search on Freshmeat was disappointing). Modellers that allow rapid modelling of an area, that can cut
Consumer Reports lacks technical expertise in many areas, but at least their approach has some level of integrity.
CR takes an approach that is valuable to the very largest number of people possible. Their computer reviews are probably uninteresting to a computer expert, and their auto reviews to a mechanic. But they provide useful high-level information that has one terribly useful characteristic -- it can be trusted.
It is *unbelivably* difficult to get information that can be trusted when you have whole industries built around not just feeding misleading information to the consumer, a la advertising and marketing, but around figuring out how to mislead the people that feed information to consumers. Buy off or influence reviewers, get desired songs played on the radio, etc. I'm sure that advertising agencies will start addressing Wikipedia soon enough.
I agree that more specialization might be nice, but it's difficult to have a broad enough appeal to be completely subscription-funded and thus remain neutral if you become too specialized.
PII and PIII boxes make very nice routers, file/web servers, secondary terminals (ever need to do remote debugging?), print spoolers, thin clients, syslog servers (you don't keep your syslog on a separate machine for security?), backup servers...
Actually, Pentium 1s make even nicer routers, because they use so little power that they can be run fanless with a large heatsink.
If your definition of "garbage" is "anything that doesn't run Vista and Flash well", then, sure, they're garbage. All I'm saying is that there are a lot of applications for which these computers are quite useful. If *I* didn't have another computer, I'd darn well want a PIII or a PII.
"In addition, older computers don't have modern power-saving options, and consume too much electricity."
Well...I'm not so sure. A 15" CRT uses about 75W, and a 21" CRT about 125W, so you'd have to have the monitor in sleep mode a lot of the time to make up the difference. I would expect that power consumption of CD-ROM drives and hard drives are about the same for old computers and new computers. A Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz (such as the one in the computer I am using at the moment) averages about 65 watts of power (including all the power-saving tricks). A Pentium 1 averages about 15 watts of power, even without power-saving tricks, and a 486 about 4 watts.
In light of the understandable comments incited by the RedBerry, with the tune of "Commie bastards, ripping off our ideas and mass producing them," let's take a different look at our trade relations with China.
I don't see why *we* would be upset about this at all. RIM might be cranky, yes. The people who get shafted are Chinese who aren't associated with the RedBerry, who are subsidizing the development of an alternative.
SPF sucks, for the many reasons that have already been debated on Slashdot.
I haven't looked at how Goodmail works -- the idea of commercializing mail simply brings too many problems with it to the table.
If you want something that works well, but isn't used by everyone, use PGP. Anything signed by anyone you trust can go right past your spam filter.
It might be possible to do a signing system akin to PGP (or even PGP itself, though it would be expensive) server-side on outgoing mail, if it's too much of a pain to deploy PGP.
Okay, I'll bite. Why? Unless the path from your local DNS server (which, well, may not exist) to the Internet is significantly longer than the path straight to the Internet (and I would doubt that this is the case, unless you've done a very poor job of configuring your network), the only attack against DNS that you avoid that I can think of would be someone actually rooting the DNS server itself (and not even then, if the DNS server is on an outbound segment). Anyone that can root a machine on a segment that can see the DNS requests can still spoof the request.
Trademarks have been abused (e.g. Disney trademarking tons of views of the Mouse, with the view of keeping him permanently locked up). However, I would say that the benefits of trademark law far outweigh the drawbacks.
The idea of a trademark is that it is possible for a vendor to have a distinctive mark. It is important for reputation accrual ("Oh, right, Apple produces nice computers") and to keep competitors from trying to confuse consumers ("I bought an Aple computer, but it's not as nice as you said that it would be!").
The main irritating thing I see with trademarks is that today, marketers treat a trademark as something that one tries to associate intangible "good feeling" with, and don't want the trademark to ever be used with something negative. This is not at all the intention behind the creation of trademarks -- however, I don't believe that the cost to society is very high.
In the arena of copyright, my largest complaint is that copyright lasts too long. Also, I wish that copyright did not cover certain elements that it does.
I'd like to see copyright law changed to not cover elements like characters or settings. Currently, if someone writes a series of books, it is possible for them to sue anyone that writes a "compatible" book set in the same universe and with the same characters (unless the book is parody, etc). This is, I think, an undesireable effect. While I can understand requiring that a work be clearly labelled as not coming from the original author and not being official, it is silly that our content creators cannot explore their *own* branches for what they'd like to see happen. How many times have you read a book or watched a movie and wondered "What if, instead of character X surviving, he died? What would happen to the world afterwards?" I'd like to see this made legal.
There are people who would oppose this -- there are currently people whose entire career is based around nothing but creation of characters. They've adapted to the current legal environment, and it's difficult to tell them "no, you don't have this protection any more." It's still something that I'd like to see.
Copyright lasts far, far too long. The purpose of copyright -- a state-granted and enforced monopoly -- is to encourage the production of useful works and move them into the public domain. However, copyright has been repeatedly extended -- originally it lasted fourteen years, with an extension for another fourteen years if the copyright holder applied for it. Since copyright is designed to encourage the funding of content creation, this is more than enough time to encourage a company to fund that creation. Few companies look more than four or five years into the future -- looking more than twenty-eight into the future when deciding whether or not to fund the creation of a new work is simply not done.
However, new and very lucrative industries appeared (such as the recording industry and Hollywood) and suddenly companies could buy and hang onto rights that lasted a long time. These companies paid legislators to basically siphon value out of the public domain, where the Framers had intended it to arrive, and reserve it for them, in the form of incredibly long-lived copyright laws. Currently, copyright is life of author plus seventy years, or 95 years for works created by a company.
For many works, such as software, the useful lifetime of the work is *far* shorter than the copyright, which means that no useful work has been or will be placed into the public domain in these fields. Software was not around at the time that copyright law was being created -- if it was, copyright would undoubtedly be shorter in some areas. In addition, traditionally, the Library of Congress served as a mechanism to "open source" copyrighted content. Unless one registered their work with the Library of Congress (which involved storing tw
Although patents were initially intended to stop techniques being kept secret or lost from the public or King in England, then extended with the intentions to assist the small inventor to protect itself from larger predators, it has done neither of these.
The problem is that the idea of patents is that there are relatively few advances, that those advances are easy to reverse-engineer, and so forth. I know that I can't make a new plow like that one that the company down the road produced for two decades, because they came up with the design first.
But an engineer in any modern industry has orders of magnitude more patents to be familiar with. As a result, no engineer has any idea what IP is covering his field (despite the efforts of the USPTO to provide a free, searchable database). This means that patents, as a whole, simply generate more business risk, since it's impossible to predict what is safe to do.
(Actually, so many broad patents have been granted that it's not safe to do much of *anything*, but that's really a different complaint).
Things are financially good for MS right now. Right now, their PR with partners is worth more than the money that patent lawsuits could bring in. But do you really expect that this situation will hold forever?
Look at SCO. They did the most rational thing for their shareholders, which is trying to use their IP portfolio in every way possible. SCO didn't have a portfolio anywhere *near* as large as Microsoft does.
So, we joke about putting Microsoft out of business, but can you imagine the amount of damage that Microsoft will cause if that actually happened?
It's not that we think that IBM is going to suddenly rip off its clothes, put flowers in its hair, and run amok, pointing at everyone and singing "I'm gonna sue you for everything you've got! I've got tons of patents!"
It's that we wonder what happens to these patents. IBM filed for them, so they clearly expect a return on them. Do they sell their IP portfolio down the line to companies with less to lose, as many failing companies have? What if they get into financial trouble and are looking at collapse? Then they have every incentive to become an SCO and use every bit of their IP as a wedge.
MAD worked (and it was damned scary there at points, even so) because there were rational people running things, things were going pretty well for all parties involved, there weren't many parties involved, and so forth.
We were *really* worried when the USSR started to collapse, because the transition time was where someone might get desperate and start lobbing nuclear weapons.
The problem is that companies go under all the time, and those are put in the position of it being in their benefit to lob patent suits everywhere. In addition, there are a *lot* of patent holders -- it's not just "seven countries with nukes" or anything like that. If IBM really got into trouble and they gave free reign to their lawyers to exploit every patent, they could probably shut down US industry (barring Congressional action to rule all their patents invalid or something along those lines).
You have industries with a small number of players where it is difficult or impossible for anyone new to enter the industry because the existing players have hundreds or thousands of patents covering the product. Even if a lot of those patents are complete nonsense, it is expensive to fight them -- and it only takes a single injunction to kill a challenger. As a result, the number of players in the arena slowly shrinks, and all players cross-license their patents (so producing a patent produces no competitive advantage).
See CPUs (Intel/AMD). See GPUs (Nvidia/ATI/Matrox/S3). See hard drives (couple more players here, but same idea).
Any time all the existing players in an industry are cross-licensing patents to each other, you know that something is horribly broken, because the patent system *isn't* doing what it is supposed to do.
And now, it's been discovered the executive branch has been conducting massive, illegal, domestic surveillance on its own citizens. You and me. And I at least consoled myself that finally, finally the American people will have had enough. Evidentially, we haven't.
There was a brief backlash during the 70s (see the Church Commission) when it came out that the government had been doing things like using the FBI's powers to gather blackmail information on people like Martin Luther King. Clearly the time of that backlash is over.
NTP over SSL (a VPN-sorta thing) would not work well at all, especially for a Tier-1. NTP requires minimal and predictable delay, and a server may have a large number of users -- connection setup and teardown would be very sizeable.
He is estimating under $10k / year in extra costs in damages, so the problem is that this is an individual and not an institution.
Which is why I can't understand why D-Link didn't just shut up and foot the bill. He has a very legitimate gripe, and as long as he doesn't go public about it, $10K/year is pretty minimal. The cost of the lawyer they set on him, assuming anything more than four or five bullshit letters with no research were sent is going to exceed this.
* To keep the network working, the NTP system is tiered. Anything other than a time server used to redistribute time to other machines should probably access a Tier 3 system, or a Tier 2 if that is not possible. It should never hammer a Tier 1 -- this can screw up the rest of the NTP network.
* There are large lists of NTP servers, and they list access restrictions. As pointed out in the letter, this guy explicitly stated in his access rules that this server was not for client use.
* As pointed out in the letter, this guy explicitly stated in his access rules that this server was not for use outside of Denmark.
You may not be used to this sort of thing, because no such set of agreements exists for, say, webservers. However, in the NTP world, network administrators respect these, and it is why the time system continues to work.
What D-Link is doing hurts all Danish NTP users, and freeloads off a volunteer (D-Link is selling the product and profiting from it -- let *them* handle the traffic and factor any bandwidth costs into their product cost). It opens their product to potential abuse if the server becomes malicious (a properly-designed router would allow the user to specify an NTP server, or if the user is unable to configure a router, to do what the letter suggested and use a D-Link-controlled name.). It violates agreements that have been generally respected by the NTP-using administrator community for many years.
It's cheaper for D-Link to freeload off other people.
That being said, D-Link has acquired quite a bad reputation in my book. The last time they were prominently mentioned on Slashdot was when their routers were randomly silently redirecting a small chunk of HTTP traffic to D-Link advertisements, and causing the obvious mayhem in non-human-readable HTTP traffic.
I'm also wondering just how much mayhem this guy could cause on various networks by playing with the time he returns. I'm not advocating that...I'm just pointing out that D-Link is rather leaving the owners of their routers open to whatever he chooses to do to them. Adding NTP support to a product is one thing -- hardcoding it to reference an NTP server that you can't guarantee is trustworthy is another thing. Suppose, for instance, this guy drops the name due to the expenses and someone else picks it up...
To be blunt, buying D-Link hardware at this point means that you're kind of, well, asking for whatever the hardware does to you.
But even if Lucent were to win, isn't MPEG2 a software thing? Asking for a recall seems frivolous considering you can just do as software...um...downgrade(?)
Not necessarily. I don't know what the situation is regarding the Xbox 360, but it used to be common to include MPEG decoding hardware. I believe that consumer DVD players do so.
Even if not, it could be in ROMs or something else.
But, really, when it comes down to it, Lucent just wants to get its fingers into the pie.
Slashdot Mirror
Having the browser do spelling correction is not something I have a real problem with.
Verisign was a big problem because it was screwing with important mechanisms that people rely on. Having a web browser do this may be:
* a violation of your privacy
* providing valuable marketing data to Microsoft
* An attempt to squeeze Google out of the market by taking advantage of the fact that by default, Microsoft controls whatever gets entered in the URL bar.
* Not likely to be that helpful.
* Promote misspelling and typing. If you never get any negative feedback, you never learn the correct spelling -- from your standpoint, the alternate spelling *is* correct and took you to the right website. I suspect that widespread use of Word AutoCorrect is the single greatest driver of people being unable to avoid typing "teh".
However, this at least doesn't break other people's systems.
This is a good sign that people designing web browsers have screwed up the security aspect of their UI.
The typical user should not be one unintuitive click away from screwing up their computer.
The problem is that this system is targeted at terrorism, but with the patriot act, it allows all this power to actively be used against americans.
History teaches us that this should not be a surprise. Give the federal government excessive police powers ("But we need to hunt *communists*!") and they *will* abuse it.
Hitler was ahead of his time. We already tried claiming that we needed expanded police powers to hunt "communists". Now we're claiming that we need them to hunt "terrorists". Hitler just took the Reichstag fire and demanded more powers because he needed to hunt "communist terrorists".
Apparently not that many, because there are hundreds or thousands of GPL game projects on SourceForge, and most of them are dead (or never really got started in the first place) because there weren't enough people to make them. Surely some of them had to be good ideas!
Consider the following points:
* I think that a lot of people that want to write games are younger folks -- the idea of writing a game is one of the things that I remember people doing in high school when they learned to code. These folks have less experience to draw on, and possibly a harder time with project management issues. If a project is your first, you have to make all your stumbles and do your learning on it...and so there are probably a lot of games out there that go unfinished. Also, a lot of these folks go off to or leave college, and it drastically affects their schedule.
* One of the largest motivators for open source is that a hacker is building something that *he can use*. Yes, peer approval and resume-building and a feeling of helping someone out or fighting against an objectionable closed-source company are all nice, but at the end of the day, there are a *lot* of (and really good) development tools written by open source folks, and few educational games for five-year-olds (yes, I know that there are some projects along those lines). Many, many games can be played through once or twice, and then the replay value fades. As this happens, the hacker can't enjoy using the software that he's writing, and his interest fades.
The open source games that have done well have one very noticable characteristic -- they all have extremely high replay value, much more so than almost any commercial games. People can and have played games like NetHack or ToME for far more hours than just about any commercial games. There are open source card games, and board games. Most open-source games have a randomized element, or are played against other players, so that they continue to be a challenge. I can think of almost zero plot-based open source games that have done well (text-based interactive fiction being a notable exception, and I think that this is more due to the large pool of potential IF authors and the reduced amount of content that must be produced). Plot-based games lose much of their charm after the first time through, so OSS folks can't really enjoy their own game.
* Artists aren't rich. Programmers are, by and large, currently in heavy demand. This means that they can get away with working shorter hours and making plenty of money. They have more potential free time to run out and simply give away on free games.
If you do graphics work, things are, as I understand it, more competitive. One (traditional media) artist that I know of has to work a number of jobs to make ends meet -- I'm sure that if she didn't have to take care of her expenses, she'd love to donate her time.
I've no idea where sound engineering work comes in.
* Game content is less fun than game code. This is a guess on my part, but if I wanted to do some graphics work, I think that I'd rather try out a bunch of my own ideas. It has to be much less fun to, say, draw fifty frames of some character to obtain smooth animation.
Hence, we have plenty of OSS game engines, but less free content.
* Game content is less interchangeable than game code. OSS projects generally have code contributions from many, many people, and are patched together by a maintainer. People lose interest or have increased time demands and stop working on the project, and other people become interested or have a use for the code and start contributing patches. This works well for code. The user doesn't know how many people have worked on the code, because the coders don't have a user-visible style. I don't know whether Joe Hacker has a clever strategy for traversing linked lists when I use software. As long as my softwar
Apparently not that many, because there are hundreds or thousands of GPL game projects on SourceForge, and most of them are dead (or never really got started in the first place) because there weren't enough people to make them. Surely some of them had to be good ideas!
Marketing is one big one. Have you played Battle for Wesnoth? HoMM and similar series would be the closest commercial equivalent, and Wesnoth is at least in the same neighborhood in the content arena. Its gameplay is pretty popular.
Everyone I know that has tried Wesnoth has liked it...but they hadn't heard about it.
I mean, there's no reason whatsoever that the next Counterstrike couldn't be built on Cube or the GPL'd Quake 2 source... so why isn't anyone doing it?
Quake 2 *source* does not come with the textures and so forth, which are still under copyright (I'm not complaining -- I think that this is a pretty good system). If you mod for the current, commercial Quake, you have a set of graphics and audio all ready for you, and you can work on high-level gameplay issues.
Suppose I hire the kind of people who are creative enough to create a good game, and then I hire people that are able to code that creativity into a functioning product. Isn't this a much better model than hiring 50 super-coders to bust out YAJMF? (Yet Another John Madden Football) Game.
:-)
Not if what your audience wants is football games, no, that's not a very good allocation of resources.
(Disclaimer: I don't work in the games industry. This is speculation.)
So what is the solution, besides scaling back the size of games?
Doing games reminds me of doing graphic artwork. A lot of people want to be involved, because they can try out their ideas and the end result is entertaining. However, in graphics, one guy can try out his own ideas. If you want to make a full-blown game, you need more than one person to perform all the implementation work to try out the set of that one person's ideas. That means that there's no way for that one person to be as creative as he wants.
The solution is better game-building tools and toolkits. Game development companies all seem to reimplement their own graphics engines, for example. That may be cool if you're a programmer with an interest in seeing new, pretty things, but frankly...writing code to cleverly do level-of-detail -- the same thing that's been done four hundred times before -- drives up the cost in human labor to produce a game.
So my first guess would be to use existing libraries as much as possible. If you want to do game design, see if you can avoid doing low-level work as much as possible. Use Crystal Space or some other pre-existing graphics engine. There are *plenty* of libre and gratis graphics engines out there, and frankly, the player's experience is simply not improved that much more by a 10% improvement in how many polygons you can put on the screen with a given number of CPU cycles. Sure, if you're making a content-laden game, you want your game to look unique -- but you can do that by writing a small amount of high-level code to spit out particles flying out along a differently-shaped path, rather than building yet another particle engine.
Same thing goes for sound. I doubt that OpenAL in and of itself can be used as a full-blown game sound engine, but it's probably a pretty worthwhile foundation at least. I would assume that there are some gratis and libre game sound engines built on OpenAL, but a quick search of freshmeat didn't seem to turn anything up.
If your game fits into one of a certain set of games, there is already a game framework with all this done for you already. If you're writing a shooter, there are scads of Quake-type engines available (and game developers *have* been using these). I'm unaware of any major adventure game or RPG engines that are freely available and support all the features that current games are being released with.
As for content -- artwork and audio -- this I'm totally in the dark about. I would assume that there is some sort of archive of intended-for-game-use content that someone sells (and probably even good-quality gratis stuff out there somewhere), but I'm not aware of any such. I should ideally be able to, if I add a cat to my game, be able to search for "meow", get back a bunch of audio files, try them out rapidly, and then simply add the one I want into my game.
Modelling -- again, I'm not familiar with what resources are out there, though I have seen gratis archives of models. I think that rapid modelling is one of the areas that software developers could vastly improve. Right now, when I think of a "building", I need to sit down and start modelling, and even if I'm good, it takes a while to build such a thing. "Buildings" are common things to make. Really, modelling software should have vast amounts of templates such that they can easily build a stock building with nothing more than a "create templates.skycraper" command or a menu choice, and then allow high-level changes to various parameters -- window shapes, water stains, grime, etc. Terrain modellers exist -- I was quite impressed with how much Bryce sped up terrain modelling, and I'm sure that there are probably better terrain modelers available (though a search on Freshmeat was disappointing). Modellers that allow rapid modelling of an area, that can cut
Consumer Reports lacks technical expertise in many areas, but at least their approach has some level of integrity.
CR takes an approach that is valuable to the very largest number of people possible. Their computer reviews are probably uninteresting to a computer expert, and their auto reviews to a mechanic. But they provide useful high-level information that has one terribly useful characteristic -- it can be trusted.
It is *unbelivably* difficult to get information that can be trusted when you have whole industries built around not just feeding misleading information to the consumer, a la advertising and marketing, but around figuring out how to mislead the people that feed information to consumers. Buy off or influence reviewers, get desired songs played on the radio, etc. I'm sure that advertising agencies will start addressing Wikipedia soon enough.
I agree that more specialization might be nice, but it's difficult to have a broad enough appeal to be completely subscription-funded and thus remain neutral if you become too specialized.
PII and PIII boxes make very nice routers, file/web servers, secondary terminals (ever need to do remote debugging?), print spoolers, thin clients, syslog servers (you don't keep your syslog on a separate machine for security?), backup servers...
Actually, Pentium 1s make even nicer routers, because they use so little power that they can be run fanless with a large heatsink.
If your definition of "garbage" is "anything that doesn't run Vista and Flash well", then, sure, they're garbage. All I'm saying is that there are a lot of applications for which these computers are quite useful. If *I* didn't have another computer, I'd darn well want a PIII or a PII.
"In addition, older computers don't have modern power-saving options, and consume too much electricity."
Well...I'm not so sure. A 15" CRT uses about 75W, and a 21" CRT about 125W, so you'd have to have the monitor in sleep mode a lot of the time to make up the difference. I would expect that power consumption of CD-ROM drives and hard drives are about the same for old computers and new computers. A Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz (such as the one in the computer I am using at the moment) averages about 65 watts of power (including all the power-saving tricks). A Pentium 1 averages about 15 watts of power, even without power-saving tricks, and a 486 about 4 watts.
In light of the understandable comments incited by the RedBerry, with the tune of "Commie bastards, ripping off our ideas and mass producing them," let's take a different look at our trade relations with China.
I don't see why *we* would be upset about this at all. RIM might be cranky, yes. The people who get shafted are Chinese who aren't associated with the RedBerry, who are subsidizing the development of an alternative.
SPF sucks, for the many reasons that have already been debated on Slashdot.
I haven't looked at how Goodmail works -- the idea of commercializing mail simply brings too many problems with it to the table.
If you want something that works well, but isn't used by everyone, use PGP. Anything signed by anyone you trust can go right past your spam filter.
It might be possible to do a signing system akin to PGP (or even PGP itself, though it would be expensive) server-side on outgoing mail, if it's too much of a pain to deploy PGP.
But SPF is not a fix for spam. Sorry.
Fire up a packet sniffer hooked up to the outbound.
It probably tries a number of different servers.
I wonder if it hits any other Tier 1s.
Okay, I'll bite. Why? Unless the path from your local DNS server (which, well, may not exist) to the Internet is significantly longer than the path straight to the Internet (and I would doubt that this is the case, unless you've done a very poor job of configuring your network), the only attack against DNS that you avoid that I can think of would be someone actually rooting the DNS server itself (and not even then, if the DNS server is on an outbound segment). Anyone that can root a machine on a segment that can see the DNS requests can still spoof the request.
Trademarks have been abused (e.g. Disney trademarking tons of views of the Mouse, with the view of keeping him permanently locked up). However, I would say that the benefits of trademark law far outweigh the drawbacks.
The idea of a trademark is that it is possible for a vendor to have a distinctive mark. It is important for reputation accrual ("Oh, right, Apple produces nice computers") and to keep competitors from trying to confuse consumers ("I bought an Aple computer, but it's not as nice as you said that it would be!").
The main irritating thing I see with trademarks is that today, marketers treat a trademark as something that one tries to associate intangible "good feeling" with, and don't want the trademark to ever be used with something negative. This is not at all the intention behind the creation of trademarks -- however, I don't believe that the cost to society is very high.
In the arena of copyright, my largest complaint is that copyright lasts too long. Also, I wish that copyright did not cover certain elements that it does.
I'd like to see copyright law changed to not cover elements like characters or settings. Currently, if someone writes a series of books, it is possible for them to sue anyone that writes a "compatible" book set in the same universe and with the same characters (unless the book is parody, etc). This is, I think, an undesireable effect. While I can understand requiring that a work be clearly labelled as not coming from the original author and not being official, it is silly that our content creators cannot explore their *own* branches for what they'd like to see happen. How many times have you read a book or watched a movie and wondered "What if, instead of character X surviving, he died? What would happen to the world afterwards?" I'd like to see this made legal.
There are people who would oppose this -- there are currently people whose entire career is based around nothing but creation of characters. They've adapted to the current legal environment, and it's difficult to tell them "no, you don't have this protection any more." It's still something that I'd like to see.
Copyright lasts far, far too long. The purpose of copyright -- a state-granted and enforced monopoly -- is to encourage the production of useful works and move them into the public domain. However, copyright has been repeatedly extended -- originally it lasted fourteen years, with an extension for another fourteen years if the copyright holder applied for it. Since copyright is designed to encourage the funding of content creation, this is more than enough time to encourage a company to fund that creation. Few companies look more than four or five years into the future -- looking more than twenty-eight into the future when deciding whether or not to fund the creation of a new work is simply not done.
However, new and very lucrative industries appeared (such as the recording industry and Hollywood) and suddenly companies could buy and hang onto rights that lasted a long time. These companies paid legislators to basically siphon value out of the public domain, where the Framers had intended it to arrive, and reserve it for them, in the form of incredibly long-lived copyright laws. Currently, copyright is life of author plus seventy years, or 95 years for works created by a company.
For many works, such as software, the useful lifetime of the work is *far* shorter than the copyright, which means that no useful work has been or will be placed into the public domain in these fields. Software was not around at the time that copyright law was being created -- if it was, copyright would undoubtedly be shorter in some areas. In addition, traditionally, the Library of Congress served as a mechanism to "open source" copyrighted content. Unless one registered their work with the Library of Congress (which involved storing tw
Darn, you're right. Thank you. The list of badly-built routers is becoming difficult to keep track of.
Although patents were initially intended to stop techniques being kept secret or lost from the public or King in England, then extended with the intentions to assist the small inventor to protect itself from larger predators, it has done neither of these.
The problem is that the idea of patents is that there are relatively few advances, that those advances are easy to reverse-engineer, and so forth. I know that I can't make a new plow like that one that the company down the road produced for two decades, because they came up with the design first.
But an engineer in any modern industry has orders of magnitude more patents to be familiar with. As a result, no engineer has any idea what IP is covering his field (despite the efforts of the USPTO to provide a free, searchable database). This means that patents, as a whole, simply generate more business risk, since it's impossible to predict what is safe to do.
(Actually, so many broad patents have been granted that it's not safe to do much of *anything*, but that's really a different complaint).
Things are financially good for MS right now. Right now, their PR with partners is worth more than the money that patent lawsuits could bring in. But do you really expect that this situation will hold forever?
Look at SCO. They did the most rational thing for their shareholders, which is trying to use their IP portfolio in every way possible. SCO didn't have a portfolio anywhere *near* as large as Microsoft does.
So, we joke about putting Microsoft out of business, but can you imagine the amount of damage that Microsoft will cause if that actually happened?
It's not that we think that IBM is going to suddenly rip off its clothes, put flowers in its hair, and run amok, pointing at everyone and singing "I'm gonna sue you for everything you've got! I've got tons of patents!"
It's that we wonder what happens to these patents. IBM filed for them, so they clearly expect a return on them. Do they sell their IP portfolio down the line to companies with less to lose, as many failing companies have? What if they get into financial trouble and are looking at collapse? Then they have every incentive to become an SCO and use every bit of their IP as a wedge.
MAD worked (and it was damned scary there at points, even so) because there were rational people running things, things were going pretty well for all parties involved, there weren't many parties involved, and so forth.
We were *really* worried when the USSR started to collapse, because the transition time was where someone might get desperate and start lobbing nuclear weapons.
The problem is that companies go under all the time, and those are put in the position of it being in their benefit to lob patent suits everywhere. In addition, there are a *lot* of patent holders -- it's not just "seven countries with nukes" or anything like that. If IBM really got into trouble and they gave free reign to their lawyers to exploit every patent, they could probably shut down US industry (barring Congressional action to rule all their patents invalid or something along those lines).
No.
You have industries with a small number of players where it is difficult or impossible for anyone new to enter the industry because the existing players have hundreds or thousands of patents covering the product. Even if a lot of those patents are complete nonsense, it is expensive to fight them -- and it only takes a single injunction to kill a challenger. As a result, the number of players in the arena slowly shrinks, and all players cross-license their patents (so producing a patent produces no competitive advantage).
See CPUs (Intel/AMD). See GPUs (Nvidia/ATI/Matrox/S3). See hard drives (couple more players here, but same idea).
Any time all the existing players in an industry are cross-licensing patents to each other, you know that something is horribly broken, because the patent system *isn't* doing what it is supposed to do.
And now, it's been discovered the executive branch has been conducting massive, illegal, domestic surveillance on its own citizens. You and me. And I at least consoled myself that finally, finally the American people will have had enough. Evidentially, we haven't.
There was a brief backlash during the 70s (see the Church Commission) when it came out that the government had been doing things like using the FBI's powers to gather blackmail information on people like Martin Luther King. Clearly the time of that backlash is over.
I swear that one of these days I'm going to just start rejecting non-PGP-encrypted emails.
NTP over SSL (a VPN-sorta thing) would not work well at all, especially for a Tier-1. NTP requires minimal and predictable delay, and a server may have a large number of users -- connection setup and teardown would be very sizeable.
He is estimating under $10k / year in extra costs in damages, so the problem is that this is an individual and not an institution.
Which is why I can't understand why D-Link didn't just shut up and foot the bill. He has a very legitimate gripe, and as long as he doesn't go public about it, $10K/year is pretty minimal. The cost of the lawyer they set on him, assuming anything more than four or five bullshit letters with no research were sent is going to exceed this.
There are three conventions being violated:
* To keep the network working, the NTP system is tiered. Anything other than a time server used to redistribute time to other machines should probably access a Tier 3 system, or a Tier 2 if that is not possible. It should never hammer a Tier 1 -- this can screw up the rest of the NTP network.
* There are large lists of NTP servers, and they list access restrictions. As pointed out in the letter, this guy explicitly stated in his access rules that this server was not for client use.
* As pointed out in the letter, this guy explicitly stated in his access rules that this server was not for use outside of Denmark.
You may not be used to this sort of thing, because no such set of agreements exists for, say, webservers. However, in the NTP world, network administrators respect these, and it is why the time system continues to work.
What D-Link is doing hurts all Danish NTP users, and freeloads off a volunteer (D-Link is selling the product and profiting from it -- let *them* handle the traffic and factor any bandwidth costs into their product cost). It opens their product to potential abuse if the server becomes malicious (a properly-designed router would allow the user to specify an NTP server, or if the user is unable to configure a router, to do what the letter suggested and use a D-Link-controlled name.). It violates agreements that have been generally respected by the NTP-using administrator community for many years.
It's cheaper for D-Link to freeload off other people.
That being said, D-Link has acquired quite a bad reputation in my book. The last time they were prominently mentioned on Slashdot was when their routers were randomly silently redirecting a small chunk of HTTP traffic to D-Link advertisements, and causing the obvious mayhem in non-human-readable HTTP traffic.
I'm also wondering just how much mayhem this guy could cause on various networks by playing with the time he returns. I'm not advocating that...I'm just pointing out that D-Link is rather leaving the owners of their routers open to whatever he chooses to do to them. Adding NTP support to a product is one thing -- hardcoding it to reference an NTP server that you can't guarantee is trustworthy is another thing. Suppose, for instance, this guy drops the name due to the expenses and someone else picks it up...
To be blunt, buying D-Link hardware at this point means that you're kind of, well, asking for whatever the hardware does to you.
But even if Lucent were to win, isn't MPEG2 a software thing? Asking for a recall seems frivolous considering you can just do as software...um...downgrade(?)
Not necessarily. I don't know what the situation is regarding the Xbox 360, but it used to be common to include MPEG decoding hardware. I believe that consumer DVD players do so.
Even if not, it could be in ROMs or something else.
But, really, when it comes down to it, Lucent just wants to get its fingers into the pie.