Heh, like you I was expecting to see Chinese Democracy mentioned in the GP joke. Actually listening to Chinese Democracy is almost, if not quite, as shocking as playing DNF.
Stores will have it in a few days, but you can listen to it here right now. I am pleasantly surprised, actually - was expecting a complete disgrace after all this time. But it sounds good, after an initial listening (my final opinion will wait for it to sink in).
If you're just going to outright shit-can it, why not open-source it? At least then people can benefit from the energy you put into it instead of just throwing that all away.
Probably not an option for several reasons.
The first is that the Lively client is based on Gamebryo. This is closed-source, and extremely expensive at that (it's a top-tier game engine, these things can cost $100,000 or more, easily). So the client code is essentially useless for open source purposes (as part of a derivative work of Gamebryo, doing so might even be prohibited according to the Gamebryo license, but I don't know).
As for the server, Google generally isn't in the business of open sourcing server components of theirs (although exceptions have happened), so I doubt it will happen in this case.
When you buy a netbook with installed Linux, all of your complaints here are not relevant. Yes, Linux has a way to go yet with regards to installing on random hardware, but the article was not talking about random hardware installations, but pre-installed netbooks.
So there must be some other reason for the higher rate of returns. In any case, as others mentioned, the higher rate is meaningless without absolute numbers. 40% return (vs. 10% for Windows) would be horrendous; 4% return (vs. 1% for Windows) would be not great, but not that bad either.
Outside of obfuscation, how exactly do you close source a JavaScript library that your browser can access via HTTP? I suppose Microsoft could incorporate it directly into the browser, but that doesn't seem likely.
"Close" can mean two things here. Yes, the source will remain visible, since its Javascript. So that's one sense of "open". However, it doesn't need to remain open source in the sense of the license. Microsoft could, in theory, add some features and relicense it under proprietary terms; the MIT license allows that. That is, seeing the source doesn't mean it's open source in the licensing sense.
Happily, Microsoft announced that they won't change the license.
I agree there are similarities, and you accurately described them.
However, there are also great dissimilarities, as I mentioned, and even without those dissimilarities, this is a sample of 1. It's very, very hard to predict this stuff.
Yeah I'm fairly certain Obama will be the next president, and while everyone seems to love him now, come 2012 they'll be despising him almost as badly as they despise Bush. The current state of the economy and $100 oil is beyond the fixing of any one man, and things are not going to improve.
FDR tried and failed to fix the 1930s recession..... it ultimately took a world war to bring-back full employment. Without the war, FDR would have been voted out of office in 1940, and the recession would have stretched through most of the 1940s.
Obama faces what FDR faced, and Obama's not going to be any more successful. (Unless a war saves him.)
So, based on a sample of 1, you make this conclusion?
The background to the 1930's depression is very different from that of the current crisis. The global economy is very much changed (greater interdependence, etc.), and the US is very different internally as well (different fields fuel the US economy, as just one example familiar to us here, the tech industry).
Economics is not a 'science' in the sense of controlled experiments. Basically the 1930's depression is an anecdote, and extrapolating from it the course of the current situation is impossible.
So 4 out of about 4000 apps have been rejected so far. 0.4%. I don't think it's time to panic yet.
4 that we know of. It's possible that a large number of other developers who had their apps rejected actually did read the NDA they had agreed to, and are fuming in silence.
That's the whole idea of NDAing this stuff: To keep the extent of the problem a secret. So you can't say "it's only 4, nothing to see here."
I'd assume it's a legal grey area - does anyone actually know whether the idea that the EULA of a compiler can limit the distribution of binaries that it outputs has ever been tested in court?
The fact that the XBMC team don't want to prod MS with a stick and blindly hope that they aren't bankrupted by defensive legal costs, of course, is entirely understandable, but I'd still think that they've got something of a case; it's not like the makers of any other tool get a say in how you use it or what you do with the product you produce with it.
The issue is that compilers often add something to the compiled code: libraries, and so forth, but even headers and metadata might be an issue.
This isn't like a breadmaker machine telling you (well, the manufacturer telling you) you can't sell their bread under so-and-so conditions, this is like a breadmaker that makes bread that includes some 'secret sauce' of theirs telling you you can't redistribute their secret sauce without permission (but of course even this analogy is wrong, since 'redistributing' - reselling - sauce would probably be legal, whereas here redistribution would be copyright infringement).
This isn't limited to Microsoft. If GCC didn't expressly allow it, you wouldn't be able to redistribute GCC-compiled code that wasn't under the GPL. But of course GCC is reasonable and does explicitly allow that; the point is that they do need to be explicit about it.
And google is really happy with that. They don't need to target the linux market because Mozilla is already working for them here.
The target is obviously internet explorer.
I disagree for two reasons.
First, we can only presume Google wants Chrome to run on Android, Google's handset OS. Which is based on Linux. So clearly Google has a direct and powerful motivation to target Linux with Chrome. (In fact a much stronger motivation than to get Chrome running on OS X - I wouldn't be surprised to see the Android/Linux version out earlier.)
Second, one of the best ways to weaken IE is to weaken Windows - the less people running Windows, the less run IE. But if Chrome is Windows-only, that just strengthens Windows as the only platform able to run the 'best' browser ('best' at least in Google's eyes and those that like Chrome).
In other words, every IE convert to Chrome is still locked in to Windows. Whereas Google's long-term goal is to make the OS irrelevant so long as it can access Google's web services.
Well, I guess the GP was aware of the fact that Sun can relicense ZFS in a second, but the Linux kernel might not be able to do it even if a great majority of developers wanted to.
Still, that's not much of an excuse. Also worth noting that even if ZFS was GPL3 (Sun prefers GPL3 over 2, it seems), then that would still not be good enough for Linux. So yes, this is where Linus' choice of license is giving us some problems. Overall it was a good choice, but this is the bad part.
Well, there goes my ability to watch any reruns of Seinfeld... starring a Microsoft shill & a racist
Actually, if I could be paid to create a pointless and counter productive ad for MS I would do it to... and I hate MS. Perhaps Jerry actually hates MS too and he intentionally accepted Millions and intentionally created a bad ad.
Maybe Jerry is like Oskar Schindler, profiting off the enemy while doing nothing to further their cause.
First, Jerry Seinfeld is quite rich from 'Seinfeld'. He doesn't need any more money.
Second, it's not likely he is sabotaging the campaign. It's unprofessional and would give him a bad name in the industry, as well as people associated with him (who might not be so rich as to not need work) and with this ad.
If there is a need for 10 caregivers, and there are only 2 young people, 8 people are going to be neglected, regardless of how much money they all have.
Not really. Assuming we are talking about industrialized nations, then a lack of able caregivers is not an issue, you can simply import caregivers from poor countries. They work for a few years, make what is to them a fortune, and go back. This is becoming more and more common.
Alternatively, you might be 'lucky' to have a local poor population, which you can tap instead of importing.
In both cases, yes, some poor people (local or non-local) will end up without appropriate care, in theory at least - in theory, because poor people live less, so their populations as a whole are younger.
Another issue is that this may all be irrelevant in the long run. Fewer and fewer human caregivers are going to be needed as machines ease the load. For example, it might not be long before a 'smart bed' can take care of comatose patients, shifting them to avoid bedsores, washing them, cleaning them, etc. This might well happen in the next 25 years.
Python is a nice language, but it still suffers from the limitations of the CPython implementation. It's slow, and integration with standard C modules is troublesome.
Speed isn't Python's forte, but it has no problem integrating with standard C modules. Ctypes lets you do it at runtime, and for 'static' development boost::python is wonderful.
Python has distro packaging problems - the Python maintainers don't coordinate with the maintainers of key modules, like the ones for talking to databases, and as a result Linux distros don't consistently ship with a CPython and a set of modules that play well together.
Not so, Ubuntu for example ships a perfectly-usable Python with fully-functional database interfaces, or at least I've never had a problem. I am sure this isn't unique to Ubuntu. Also nice is that Sqlite is built in to recent Python versions.
Also worth noting that ORMs like SQLAlchemy and Storm (which I personally use) are a single package away, making coding for databases in Python extremely efficient.
So it seems your complaints against Python are a little outdated. That said, you missed what is in my opinion the main remaining complaint against Python - the lack of true threading (due to the global interpreter lock). This makes pure Python implementations of large projects a little troublesome, however, a solution may arrive from a non-CPython location, e.g., Jython offers correct threading and is just about at the Python 2.5 level, running Django even.
No, Intel has been very clear that it is targeting games, even saying "we will win" about them, see this interview with an Intel VP.
NVidia is on the defensive for the simple reason that it needs to be. Not because Intel has a product that threatens NVidia, but because Intel is using classic vaporware strategies to undermine NVidia (and AMD/ATI). Intel is basically throwing around promises, and by virtue of its reputation a lot of people listen and believe those promises. With 'amazing Intel GPU technology just around the corner', some people might delay buying NVidia hardware. NVidia is trying to prevent that from happening.
It had been thought only four species of apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror.
I remember many years ago having a puppy sleeping at the end of my bed wake up in the middle of the night and start barking at its own reflection in the mirror across the room. It was startled at first, but after five or ten seconds worked out that the "other dog" was... not another dog.
Sure, its anecdotal but the puppy saw another dog at first and if it didn't finally "recognize [its] own body in [that] mirror" then how else to explain what went on?
First, you acknowledge that this is an anecdote. Second, alternative explanations are that the puppy got tired, or decided the other puppy couldn't be bullied into leaving, or that the other puppy looked too strong to be worth fighting, or simply felt it had made its point by barking and there was no need to continue. We'll never know.
That said, as others pointed out, it is easy to criticize the mirror test; on the one hand it clearly tests something high-level, but maybe not true self-awareness, and on the other hand maybe some animals just don't care to look at themselves much. The question of self-awareness is very tricky, it borders on the philosophical.
I tend to agree. While ray tracing has a lot of potential, it is several years away from being usable on mainstream hardware, and in addition, during that time rasterization technology will further improve. So even if this demo will work on gaming PCs in 5 years, rasterization graphics may look amazingly better by that time.
I wish we could access the GPU but I understand why Sony doesn't want that.
Well, I wish somebody would explain it to me. I presume the answer has something to do with piracy, but I don't see how that has a damn thing to do with access to the graphics chip under Linux.
Well, I'm just guessing, but this is my theory.
You can't just write games for consoles, you need to be a registered developer, and have a business relationship with the manufacturer, Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft. This has two goals, first, the manufacturer gets a cut out of your profits, second, the manufacturer gets to decide what runs on the console, so there aren't any subpar titles that give it a bad name.
If Linux could access the GPU, we'd have lots of nifty games ported to the PS3 in no time (Sauerbraten, Nexuiz, Alien Arena, etc. etc.), and later on developers might write games specifically for the PS3/Linux, just to get around the cost of developing using the 'normal' procedure for consoles. Sony, according to this theory, wants to avoid such things, for the reasons I said before: no more guaranteed profit per game played on their consoles, and no control over what games are played on them either.
That's all fine and good, except I don't see 'running a program' as equal to 'making a copy', for the reasons I said before. This is my problem with the ruling.
I still think it is odd that a copy made to memory, temporarily, and for purposes of convenience only shouldn't be considered copyright infringement. The judge thought otherwise, but even if this is the law then I consider the law silly.
Ok, clearly you think I misunderstood, so please clarify where.
As I read this, the judge says that even if I buy a game, I might not have the legal right to copy it into memory (more than once). Is that right?
If so, then it seems ridiculous to me, about as ridiculous as saying I can't make a copy on my retina of things I see. In both of these cases, these 'copies' are not distributed, are made for efficiency purposes only (I could in theory run the game on the CD...), and in the case of the game I even bought a copy.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, like you I was expecting to see Chinese Democracy mentioned in the GP joke. Actually listening to Chinese Democracy is almost, if not quite, as shocking as playing DNF.
Stores will have it in a few days, but you can listen to it here right now. I am pleasantly surprised, actually - was expecting a complete disgrace after all this time. But it sounds good, after an initial listening (my final opinion will wait for it to sink in).
If you're just going to outright shit-can it, why not open-source it? At least then people can benefit from the energy you put into it instead of just throwing that all away.
Probably not an option for several reasons.
The first is that the Lively client is based on Gamebryo. This is closed-source, and extremely expensive at that (it's a top-tier game engine, these things can cost $100,000 or more, easily). So the client code is essentially useless for open source purposes (as part of a derivative work of Gamebryo, doing so might even be prohibited according to the Gamebryo license, but I don't know).
As for the server, Google generally isn't in the business of open sourcing server components of theirs (although exceptions have happened), so I doubt it will happen in this case.
I beg to differ. Sauerbraten, with all effects set to max, has quite good graphics, and in addition is amazingly fun in multiplayer mode
When you buy a netbook with installed Linux, all of your complaints here are not relevant. Yes, Linux has a way to go yet with regards to installing on random hardware, but the article was not talking about random hardware installations, but pre-installed netbooks.
So there must be some other reason for the higher rate of returns. In any case, as others mentioned, the higher rate is meaningless without absolute numbers. 40% return (vs. 10% for Windows) would be horrendous; 4% return (vs. 1% for Windows) would be not great, but not that bad either.
Outside of obfuscation, how exactly do you close source a JavaScript library that your browser can access via HTTP? I suppose Microsoft could incorporate it directly into the browser, but that doesn't seem likely.
"Close" can mean two things here. Yes, the source will remain visible, since its Javascript. So that's one sense of "open". However, it doesn't need to remain open source in the sense of the license. Microsoft could, in theory, add some features and relicense it under proprietary terms; the MIT license allows that. That is, seeing the source doesn't mean it's open source in the licensing sense.
Happily, Microsoft announced that they won't change the license.
I agree there are similarities, and you accurately described them.
However, there are also great dissimilarities, as I mentioned, and even without those dissimilarities, this is a sample of 1. It's very, very hard to predict this stuff.
Yeah I'm fairly certain Obama will be the next president, and while everyone seems to love him now, come 2012 they'll be despising him almost as badly as they despise Bush. The current state of the economy and $100 oil is beyond the fixing of any one man, and things are not going to improve.
FDR tried and failed to fix the 1930s recession..... it ultimately took a world war to bring-back full employment. Without the war, FDR would have been voted out of office in 1940, and the recession would have stretched through most of the 1940s.
Obama faces what FDR faced, and Obama's not going to be any more successful. (Unless a war saves him.)
So, based on a sample of 1, you make this conclusion?
The background to the 1930's depression is very different from that of the current crisis. The global economy is very much changed (greater interdependence, etc.), and the US is very different internally as well (different fields fuel the US economy, as just one example familiar to us here, the tech industry).
Economics is not a 'science' in the sense of controlled experiments. Basically the 1930's depression is an anecdote, and extrapolating from it the course of the current situation is impossible.
So 4 out of about 4000 apps have been rejected so far. 0.4%. I don't think it's time to panic yet.
4 that we know of. It's possible that a large number of other developers who had their apps rejected actually did read the NDA they had agreed to, and are fuming in silence.
That's the whole idea of NDAing this stuff: To keep the extent of the problem a secret. So you can't say "it's only 4, nothing to see here."
Interestingly, no, it doesn't run Chrome.
Chrome is Windows-only for now, and Android is based on Linux. So no go. Android uses some Webkit-based browser at present (like Chrome, that's true).
I would expect Google to want to port Chrome to Linux just for Android, but time will tell.
I'd assume it's a legal grey area - does anyone actually know whether the idea that the EULA of a compiler can limit the distribution of binaries that it outputs has ever been tested in court?
The fact that the XBMC team don't want to prod MS with a stick and blindly hope that they aren't bankrupted by defensive legal costs, of course, is entirely understandable, but I'd still think that they've got something of a case; it's not like the makers of any other tool get a say in how you use it or what you do with the product you produce with it.
The issue is that compilers often add something to the compiled code: libraries, and so forth, but even headers and metadata might be an issue.
This isn't like a breadmaker machine telling you (well, the manufacturer telling you) you can't sell their bread under so-and-so conditions, this is like a breadmaker that makes bread that includes some 'secret sauce' of theirs telling you you can't redistribute their secret sauce without permission (but of course even this analogy is wrong, since 'redistributing' - reselling - sauce would probably be legal, whereas here redistribution would be copyright infringement).
This isn't limited to Microsoft. If GCC didn't expressly allow it, you wouldn't be able to redistribute GCC-compiled code that wasn't under the GPL. But of course GCC is reasonable and does explicitly allow that; the point is that they do need to be explicit about it.
Thanks for the correction. Sorry for the mistake.
And google is really happy with that. They don't need to target the linux market because Mozilla is already working for them here.
The target is obviously internet explorer.
I disagree for two reasons.
First, we can only presume Google wants Chrome to run on Android, Google's handset OS. Which is based on Linux. So clearly Google has a direct and powerful motivation to target Linux with Chrome. (In fact a much stronger motivation than to get Chrome running on OS X - I wouldn't be surprised to see the Android/Linux version out earlier.)
Second, one of the best ways to weaken IE is to weaken Windows - the less people running Windows, the less run IE. But if Chrome is Windows-only, that just strengthens Windows as the only platform able to run the 'best' browser ('best' at least in Google's eyes and those that like Chrome).
In other words, every IE convert to Chrome is still locked in to Windows. Whereas Google's long-term goal is to make the OS irrelevant so long as it can access Google's web services.
Well, I guess the GP was aware of the fact that Sun can relicense ZFS in a second, but the Linux kernel might not be able to do it even if a great majority of developers wanted to.
Still, that's not much of an excuse. Also worth noting that even if ZFS was GPL3 (Sun prefers GPL3 over 2, it seems), then that would still not be good enough for Linux. So yes, this is where Linus' choice of license is giving us some problems. Overall it was a good choice, but this is the bad part.
Hmm, went totally over my head, I guess :)
Well, there goes my ability to watch any reruns of Seinfeld ... starring a Microsoft shill & a racist
Actually, if I could be paid to create a pointless and counter productive ad for MS I would do it to... and I hate MS. Perhaps Jerry actually hates MS too and he intentionally accepted Millions and intentionally created a bad ad.
Maybe Jerry is like Oskar Schindler, profiting off the enemy while doing nothing to further their cause.
First, Jerry Seinfeld is quite rich from 'Seinfeld'. He doesn't need any more money.
Second, it's not likely he is sabotaging the campaign. It's unprofessional and would give him a bad name in the industry, as well as people associated with him (who might not be so rich as to not need work) and with this ad.
If there is a need for 10 caregivers, and there are only 2 young people, 8 people are going to be neglected, regardless of how much money they all have.
Not really. Assuming we are talking about industrialized nations, then a lack of able caregivers is not an issue, you can simply import caregivers from poor countries. They work for a few years, make what is to them a fortune, and go back. This is becoming more and more common.
Alternatively, you might be 'lucky' to have a local poor population, which you can tap instead of importing.
In both cases, yes, some poor people (local or non-local) will end up without appropriate care, in theory at least - in theory, because poor people live less, so their populations as a whole are younger.
Another issue is that this may all be irrelevant in the long run. Fewer and fewer human caregivers are going to be needed as machines ease the load. For example, it might not be long before a 'smart bed' can take care of comatose patients, shifting them to avoid bedsores, washing them, cleaning them, etc. This might well happen in the next 25 years.
Python is a nice language, but it still suffers from the limitations of the CPython implementation. It's slow, and integration with standard C modules is troublesome.
Speed isn't Python's forte, but it has no problem integrating with standard C modules. Ctypes lets you do it at runtime, and for 'static' development boost::python is wonderful.
Python has distro packaging problems - the Python maintainers don't coordinate with the maintainers of key modules, like the ones for talking to databases, and as a result Linux distros don't consistently ship with a CPython and a set of modules that play well together.
Not so, Ubuntu for example ships a perfectly-usable Python with fully-functional database interfaces, or at least I've never had a problem. I am sure this isn't unique to Ubuntu. Also nice is that Sqlite is built in to recent Python versions.
Also worth noting that ORMs like SQLAlchemy and Storm (which I personally use) are a single package away, making coding for databases in Python extremely efficient.
So it seems your complaints against Python are a little outdated. That said, you missed what is in my opinion the main remaining complaint against Python - the lack of true threading (due to the global interpreter lock). This makes pure Python implementations of large projects a little troublesome, however, a solution may arrive from a non-CPython location, e.g., Jython offers correct threading and is just about at the Python 2.5 level, running Django even.
No, Intel has been very clear that it is targeting games, even saying "we will win" about them, see this interview with an Intel VP.
NVidia is on the defensive for the simple reason that it needs to be. Not because Intel has a product that threatens NVidia, but because Intel is using classic vaporware strategies to undermine NVidia (and AMD/ATI). Intel is basically throwing around promises, and by virtue of its reputation a lot of people listen and believe those promises. With 'amazing Intel GPU technology just around the corner', some people might delay buying NVidia hardware. NVidia is trying to prevent that from happening.
I remember many years ago having a puppy sleeping at the end of my bed wake up in the middle of the night and start barking at its own reflection in the mirror across the room. It was startled at first, but after five or ten seconds worked out that the "other dog" was ... not another dog.
Sure, its anecdotal but the puppy saw another dog at first and if it didn't finally "recognize [its] own body in [that] mirror" then how else to explain what went on?
First, you acknowledge that this is an anecdote. Second, alternative explanations are that the puppy got tired, or decided the other puppy couldn't be bullied into leaving, or that the other puppy looked too strong to be worth fighting, or simply felt it had made its point by barking and there was no need to continue. We'll never know.
That said, as others pointed out, it is easy to criticize the mirror test; on the one hand it clearly tests something high-level, but maybe not true self-awareness, and on the other hand maybe some animals just don't care to look at themselves much. The question of self-awareness is very tricky, it borders on the philosophical.
I tend to agree. While ray tracing has a lot of potential, it is several years away from being usable on mainstream hardware, and in addition, during that time rasterization technology will further improve. So even if this demo will work on gaming PCs in 5 years, rasterization graphics may look amazingly better by that time.
I wish we could access the GPU but I understand why Sony doesn't want that.
Well, I wish somebody would explain it to me. I presume the answer has something to do with piracy, but I don't see how that has a damn thing to do with access to the graphics chip under Linux.
Well, I'm just guessing, but this is my theory.
You can't just write games for consoles, you need to be a registered developer, and have a business relationship with the manufacturer, Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft. This has two goals, first, the manufacturer gets a cut out of your profits, second, the manufacturer gets to decide what runs on the console, so there aren't any subpar titles that give it a bad name.
If Linux could access the GPU, we'd have lots of nifty games ported to the PS3 in no time (Sauerbraten, Nexuiz, Alien Arena, etc. etc.), and later on developers might write games specifically for the PS3/Linux, just to get around the cost of developing using the 'normal' procedure for consoles. Sony, according to this theory, wants to avoid such things, for the reasons I said before: no more guaranteed profit per game played on their consoles, and no control over what games are played on them either.
I think it's crappy reasoning, personally.
That's all fine and good, except I don't see 'running a program' as equal to 'making a copy', for the reasons I said before. This is my problem with the ruling.
But the law infringed upon is not "thou shalt not bot". The law is copyright infringement.
I agree 100% that cheaters are jerks. They should have their accounts revoked and whatever else is possible (not returning prepaid months?).
But to say that copying a file to memory, and temporarily, is copyright infringement, is what I have a problem with.
Ok, thanks for the clarification.
I still think it is odd that a copy made to memory, temporarily, and for purposes of convenience only shouldn't be considered copyright infringement. The judge thought otherwise, but even if this is the law then I consider the law silly.
Ok, clearly you think I misunderstood, so please clarify where.
As I read this, the judge says that even if I buy a game, I might not have the legal right to copy it into memory (more than once). Is that right?
If so, then it seems ridiculous to me, about as ridiculous as saying I can't make a copy on my retina of things I see. In both of these cases, these 'copies' are not distributed, are made for efficiency purposes only (I could in theory run the game on the CD...), and in the case of the game I even bought a copy.
Please correct me where you find mistakes.