I would like to mention here for those interested that Andrew Plotkin has written a FAQ that he has maintained meticulously through all of Uru's incarnations. Interestingly, this is the very same FAQ that was linked when Uru's first demise was posted to Slashdot.
Uru attracts dedicated fans, and Cyan has some of the best fan relationships of any company. This is a game worth trying out, if you haven't. You may not like it, but I guarantee, if you like it at all, you'll love it.
I believe Cyan plans to continue offering the content for free (as in beer) for as long as they can. They also want to be able to make content for it, but they're tight financially right now and have no resources to spare. It's sort of like their baby... they spent so much time and money and thought on it, they have as much an attachment to it as the community does. A perfect future would have them back making ages, but nobody realistically expects that to happen.
It seems they'll also be releasing parts of the content as open, like the parts that are common everywhere and serve an identifiable purpose. It would be weird if all the fan-created content used different nexus pedestals or KI icons. However, this is my interpretation, and Cyan (especially Rand Miller and RAWA) are being characteristically vague and mysterious.
There was a Mac version available in the Gametap days (using Cider), and I've heard good things about this client working under cider, as well.
Uru has always been semi-playable under Wine in Linux, but apparently the new client is even better. It seems like the mouse cursor is sorta funky, but everything else works as expected.
With the plans to Open Source, as well as the dedicated Linux fans within the community (and Cyan itself, though they have little time to spare), I expect an OpenGL renderer would be a top priority for many. At the very least, it could be changed to play nicer with Wine.
As cheesy as it is to take phrases from anime, I really can think of no better term for this.
Anonymous is a Stand Alone Complex, a group of individuals acting as copycats with no clear original, produced by the confluence of thoughts caused by mass exposure to similar media. This sort of thing is easily caused by the Internet in general, and especially the echo-chamber effect and high information volume on 4chan (and others, including Slashdot, though we tend to be less active about it).
Also, though Anonymous no longer shows this, SACs tend to be composed of people acting independently, with no knowledge of the others actions. Or, they can be thought of as a leaderless group caused by networked, subconscious groupthink on a massive scale.
I highly encourage the adoption of this term, not because I like the anime it came from, but because I think it is an extraordinarily accurate description of phenomena like Anonymous.
The difference here is that we have nukes, which function well as a sort of universal trump card. It's likely that our arsenal would at least inconvenience them, but it could do much more. Of course, it could also do much less.
But it wouldn't do much less to our planet. If we saw an unstoppable alien aggressor, we could threaten to nuke ourselves. Sure, we may all die, but it'd still be a major bargaining chip.
Besides...
Scientific discovery generally does much better in an open, cooperative society. I'm not saying that it's impossible without one, just that it proceeds much slower. Space-faring species would very likely have nearly species-wide cooperation in their past. Additionally, space-farers can easily tell other species as intelligent based on their ability to survive in space!
Also, the universe doesn't quite seem to be teeming with life, or we'd have seen it by now. It'd be a real travesty for any species to look so long for others, only to kill them. The intellegence needed for space travel almost has to imply a sense of the beauty of the universe, and from there, life.
I'd like to think the Golden Rule applies. Maybe that's naive, but interstellar travel is one of the milestones of scientific acheivement. I hope that that implies some moral strength.
It's been a while, so I'll post this for information only...
The ~10 minute restriction only applies to the h.264 encoded videos on youtube, which are all those with "high quality" versions, and the ones you can watch on the iPhone (I think...). I guess if you have a long, bad quality video it's fine.
You did not mention openness in your post, so I have no idea where you stand on that. Your post is factual, though.
People need to remember that h264 is not a free format! This is why YouTube videos are limited to ~10 minutes. A free format should be preferred in this case. Also, HTML5 is intended to be an open format. Video and audio codecs that are used with HTML5 should also be open, or the whole system is no longer open. An open format, when available, should always be selected here regardless of quality.
I'd like to point out here that, while people are always comparing Theora to, say, h264, and saying that Theora loses, you have to remember that Theora is still a quality video codec. Sure, it may not be as good, compression-wise, as h264, but it's not so much worse it shouldn't be considered. And it's open.
Google, with YouTube, has a great opportunity here to shape the future. Ogg Theora would never even be considered by anyone else, but if Google starts using it for YouTube, so will everybody else. HTML5 should have specified it from the beginning, but the WHATWG didn't have the power to back it up. Google can do it for them.
I'm going to agree with the sibling here. I always hear about people bashing pulseaudio, but I've never had any issues with it. I also particularly enjoy the low-latency networked audio features. I can play the audio from my movie on the laptop through the speakers at my computer when it's connected to the TV. Which is great, because the desktop's real close and my TV speakers suck.
Wine talks big about not being an emulator, but really?
What is an emulator if not a system of code to impersonate parts of a machine (or bit of software) that is not present? Wine is software to impersonate bits of Windows, so that Windows software can run in a different system.
Yes, there will certainly be an error involved here. However, the bigger question is whether we'll have accurate enough measurements to actually find this error. I'll bet that measurement accuracy will be a problem with this long before you run into problems with a quantized universe.
I realize that this is not really a "big business", but I feel that this information belongs somewhere in the comments, so this is a great lead-in...
They guys working on the Myst Movie (the Book of Ti'ana) started working on it in their spare time, without even telling anyone. Personally, I think they just wanted to exercise some creative skills. But eventually, they had a script and vision that they totally loved. So, they sent it off to Cyan Worlds (makers of Myst, Riven,...) as this self-shot presentation... and Cyan loved it. They're hunting around now for some production studios, and there are some seriously big names interested.
Cyan loves it's fans. They're working now on open-sourcing their cult classic (but 2 time failure) Uru Live, and have always maintained a very positive relationship with their fanbase. Other companies, off the top of my head, that have the same relationship include Valve, Valve, and, umm... hrm... why aren't there more?
All companies should do this! The fans love it, and sometimes the companies can profit, big-time! (Cyan's basically getting a free motion picture, and Valve has co-opted lots of the quality maps for Team Fortress 2)
I agree with you, in that freedom to do what you will with what you own should be a right.
This is why I, and many others, jailbreak my iPhone. Unix shell and root privileges? Why, thank you, iPwn!
Yes, it would be a much nicer world if Apple let us have more freedom from the start, but it's Apple's right, I guess, to do what they want with the product they make. I take it as a good gesture, though, that Apple is not actively discouraging jailbreaking. Now, unlocking, on the other hand...
I see it as the same as the content locks on the Xbox 360, or the Wii. They'll only play approved content, before you hack them open. Which I do, and love. But you never hear of people whining that the Wii won't let you run arbitrary content. Is the iPhone very much different?
(In generally agreement with the parent, I'll elaborate...)
Generally speaking, what causes a hangover is the ugly toxins in most drinks that come along with the alcohol. Unfortunately, these toxins also come from what gives your drink it's flavor. Unless you're drinking vodka, of course, which is basically diluted ethanol.
Drinking water will flush it out of your system a bit faster, but there are also some types of food that help it along, like, say, eggs. So, get in the holiday spirit and make a batch of eggnog! (sans alcohol, of course)
For sci-fi that is not immediately discreditable, read Alastair Reynolds.
In his book Chasm City, he relates (among other things) the story of humanity's first and last generational fleet. The story behind it's launch, the difficulties it faced (which made it the last generational fleet), and the centuries-long war that engulfed the resulting colony all provide for a really compelling story that is also wholly believable. It was hard to launch, hard to fly, failed to make a peaceful colony, so we never tried again. Regardless, something better came along...
I try to get anyone I meet that likes sci-fi to read some Reynolds. Hi! How are you? I think you should read Revelation Space...
Or maybe he didn't want to deal with the full metaverse (that would take too long), but wasn't enough of a hacker to deal with flatland. Goggling in wouldn't have made much sense for him.
People need to realize this right now. What are we still doing here? Doesn't it seem a little stupid to keep all this intelligence on one tiny, tiny planet? We're the only conscious things we know of, but any number of frequent, devastating events could end that forever. You'd think getting off this rock would be humanity's first priority.
The largest complaint to this post so far is the argument that no one is forcing you to take the money. What I'm trying to say here is that, were dollars not backed by the state, nobody would willingly trade a car for almost any amount of dollars. There are situations where it "isn't stealing" and when it "is stealing".
The same is true with socialism, though the "is stealing" is much more common in our eyes.
Both socialism and capitalism, indeed, all economic models, are just more efficient ways of bartering. Some of them work better than others, and some of them usually lead to abhorrent states. That does not make them evil. That might make them less ideal, but not evil. They both have their positive and negative traits.
I, along with most of you, see capitalism, generally speaking, as superior, but I have no specific grudges against socialism, any more than I have a grudge against ether-based light transmission.
I would like to think that ideas are separate from their implementations. So while all socialist/communist implementations have so far have had negative consequences, it is possible (though unlikely) for one of all the possible implementations to be positive.
From my point of view, unless it is impossible for there to be net positive consequences, no idea is inherently evil. (though, I'm sure to get a lot of flak and some counter-examples for this)
This is the exact reason I love Alastair Reynolds books. He's said before that if he thinks that something is not possible according to science as we know it today, he won't write it in to the books unless it is absolutely necessary.
In his major trilogy, he only does this twice: inertia suppression machinery and hypometric weapons, both of which were needed to progress the story at an interesting pace. Additionaly, he made it clear that what these devices were doing to space was abhorrently wrong: hypometric weapons gave everyone that looked at them the willies, and inertia suppressors could edit a man out of history entirely, not only killing him but removing any proof he ever existed at all. Both of these were stolen from cultures after many millions of years of space flight. Even his impossibilities begin to seem reasonable.
Also, I put forth Reynolds as the example of Sci-Fi that continues to amaze. His characters are well built, and his plot is beautiful and approachable, even as it accelerates into deep time. It certainly helps that this man clearly knows some physics, and knows what needs to be said to make technologies seem plausible. I mean, when someone detects a spacecraft based on it's specific flavor of neutrino emissions, that's a credit to the author. Even more so when the antagonists begin to use that specific signature to hunt people down one whole book later.
Seriously, unison preforms very well, and it's highly configurable, and cross-platform to boot. I use it to synchronize my music library across multiple hosts, so I can keep up to date on my laptop and mpd server. It's like rsync, with sync rules and no mucking about in serverspace (it runs over ssh).
I usually make some sort of argument against this stance along the lines of "GIMP is just as powerful, but it's different. If you learned with the Photoshop UI/Scheme, you'll always think the GIMP is sub-par". It certainly makes sense to me. I learned with the GIMP, and didn't get my hands on Photoshop until much later. I never much liked Photoshop.
Unfortunately, there is no objective measure of this sort of thing. I consider myself a "power user", as you put it, but then again I'm hardly unbiased. The GIMP does great for what I want it to do, at least, and doing it in Photoshop seems kludgy to me, because I learned how to do it with the GIMP. The GIMP will always be better for me.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to mention here for those interested that Andrew Plotkin has written a FAQ that he has maintained meticulously through all of Uru's incarnations. Interestingly, this is the very same FAQ that was linked when Uru's first demise was posted to Slashdot.
Uru attracts dedicated fans, and Cyan has some of the best fan relationships of any company. This is a game worth trying out, if you haven't. You may not like it, but I guarantee, if you like it at all, you'll love it.
I believe Cyan plans to continue offering the content for free (as in beer) for as long as they can. They also want to be able to make content for it, but they're tight financially right now and have no resources to spare. It's sort of like their baby... they spent so much time and money and thought on it, they have as much an attachment to it as the community does. A perfect future would have them back making ages, but nobody realistically expects that to happen.
It seems they'll also be releasing parts of the content as open, like the parts that are common everywhere and serve an identifiable purpose. It would be weird if all the fan-created content used different nexus pedestals or KI icons. However, this is my interpretation, and Cyan (especially Rand Miller and RAWA) are being characteristically vague and mysterious.
There was a Mac version available in the Gametap days (using Cider), and I've heard good things about this client working under cider, as well.
Uru has always been semi-playable under Wine in Linux, but apparently the new client is even better. It seems like the mouse cursor is sorta funky, but everything else works as expected.
With the plans to Open Source, as well as the dedicated Linux fans within the community (and Cyan itself, though they have little time to spare), I expect an OpenGL renderer would be a top priority for many. At the very least, it could be changed to play nicer with Wine.
As cheesy as it is to take phrases from anime, I really can think of no better term for this.
Anonymous is a Stand Alone Complex, a group of individuals acting as copycats with no clear original, produced by the confluence of thoughts caused by mass exposure to similar media. This sort of thing is easily caused by the Internet in general, and especially the echo-chamber effect and high information volume on 4chan (and others, including Slashdot, though we tend to be less active about it).
Also, though Anonymous no longer shows this, SACs tend to be composed of people acting independently, with no knowledge of the others actions. Or, they can be thought of as a leaderless group caused by networked, subconscious groupthink on a massive scale.
I highly encourage the adoption of this term, not because I like the anime it came from, but because I think it is an extraordinarily accurate description of phenomena like Anonymous.
So, really, how many of us came here hoping, at least for a second, that it would be called Public Security Section 9?
It's OK, don't be ashamed. You're among friends.
The difference here is that we have nukes, which function well as a sort of universal trump card. It's likely that our arsenal would at least inconvenience them, but it could do much more. Of course, it could also do much less.
But it wouldn't do much less to our planet. If we saw an unstoppable alien aggressor, we could threaten to nuke ourselves. Sure, we may all die, but it'd still be a major bargaining chip.
Besides...
Scientific discovery generally does much better in an open, cooperative society. I'm not saying that it's impossible without one, just that it proceeds much slower. Space-faring species would very likely have nearly species-wide cooperation in their past. Additionally, space-farers can easily tell other species as intelligent based on their ability to survive in space!
Also, the universe doesn't quite seem to be teeming with life, or we'd have seen it by now. It'd be a real travesty for any species to look so long for others, only to kill them. The intellegence needed for space travel almost has to imply a sense of the beauty of the universe, and from there, life.
I'd like to think the Golden Rule applies. Maybe that's naive, but interstellar travel is one of the milestones of scientific acheivement. I hope that that implies some moral strength.
It's been a while, so I'll post this for information only...
The ~10 minute restriction only applies to the h.264 encoded videos on youtube, which are all those with "high quality" versions, and the ones you can watch on the iPhone (I think...). I guess if you have a long, bad quality video it's fine.
You did not mention openness in your post, so I have no idea where you stand on that. Your post is factual, though.
People need to remember that h264 is not a free format! This is why YouTube videos are limited to ~10 minutes. A free format should be preferred in this case. Also, HTML5 is intended to be an open format. Video and audio codecs that are used with HTML5 should also be open, or the whole system is no longer open. An open format, when available, should always be selected here regardless of quality.
I'd like to point out here that, while people are always comparing Theora to, say, h264, and saying that Theora loses, you have to remember that Theora is still a quality video codec. Sure, it may not be as good, compression-wise, as h264, but it's not so much worse it shouldn't be considered. And it's open.
Google, with YouTube, has a great opportunity here to shape the future. Ogg Theora would never even be considered by anyone else, but if Google starts using it for YouTube, so will everybody else. HTML5 should have specified it from the beginning, but the WHATWG didn't have the power to back it up. Google can do it for them.
I'm going to agree with the sibling here. I always hear about people bashing pulseaudio, but I've never had any issues with it. I also particularly enjoy the low-latency networked audio features. I can play the audio from my movie on the laptop through the speakers at my computer when it's connected to the TV. Which is great, because the desktop's real close and my TV speakers suck.
Wine talks big about not being an emulator, but really?
What is an emulator if not a system of code to impersonate parts of a machine (or bit of software) that is not present? Wine is software to impersonate bits of Windows, so that Windows software can run in a different system.
Wine is totally an emulator.
Yes, there will certainly be an error involved here. However, the bigger question is whether we'll have accurate enough measurements to actually find this error. I'll bet that measurement accuracy will be a problem with this long before you run into problems with a quantized universe.
I realize that this is not really a "big business", but I feel that this information belongs somewhere in the comments, so this is a great lead-in...
They guys working on the Myst Movie (the Book of Ti'ana) started working on it in their spare time, without even telling anyone. Personally, I think they just wanted to exercise some creative skills. But eventually, they had a script and vision that they totally loved. So, they sent it off to Cyan Worlds (makers of Myst, Riven, ...) as this self-shot presentation... and Cyan loved it. They're hunting around now for some production studios, and there are some seriously big names interested.
Cyan loves it's fans. They're working now on open-sourcing their cult classic (but 2 time failure) Uru Live, and have always maintained a very positive relationship with their fanbase. Other companies, off the top of my head, that have the same relationship include Valve, Valve, and, umm... hrm... why aren't there more?
All companies should do this! The fans love it, and sometimes the companies can profit, big-time! (Cyan's basically getting a free motion picture, and Valve has co-opted lots of the quality maps for Team Fortress 2)
I agree with you, in that freedom to do what you will with what you own should be a right.
This is why I, and many others, jailbreak my iPhone. Unix shell and root privileges? Why, thank you, iPwn!
Yes, it would be a much nicer world if Apple let us have more freedom from the start, but it's Apple's right, I guess, to do what they want with the product they make. I take it as a good gesture, though, that Apple is not actively discouraging jailbreaking. Now, unlocking, on the other hand...
I see it as the same as the content locks on the Xbox 360, or the Wii. They'll only play approved content, before you hack them open. Which I do, and love. But you never hear of people whining that the Wii won't let you run arbitrary content. Is the iPhone very much different?
(In generally agreement with the parent, I'll elaborate...)
Generally speaking, what causes a hangover is the ugly toxins in most drinks that come along with the alcohol. Unfortunately, these toxins also come from what gives your drink it's flavor. Unless you're drinking vodka, of course, which is basically diluted ethanol.
Drinking water will flush it out of your system a bit faster, but there are also some types of food that help it along, like, say, eggs. So, get in the holiday spirit and make a batch of eggnog! (sans alcohol, of course)
For sci-fi that is not immediately discreditable, read Alastair Reynolds.
In his book Chasm City, he relates (among other things) the story of humanity's first and last generational fleet. The story behind it's launch, the difficulties it faced (which made it the last generational fleet), and the centuries-long war that engulfed the resulting colony all provide for a really compelling story that is also wholly believable. It was hard to launch, hard to fly, failed to make a peaceful colony, so we never tried again. Regardless, something better came along...
I try to get anyone I meet that likes sci-fi to read some Reynolds. Hi! How are you? I think you should read Revelation Space...
Or maybe he didn't want to deal with the full metaverse (that would take too long), but wasn't enough of a hacker to deal with flatland. Goggling in wouldn't have made much sense for him.
Yes.
People need to realize this right now. What are we still doing here? Doesn't it seem a little stupid to keep all this intelligence on one tiny, tiny planet? We're the only conscious things we know of, but any number of frequent, devastating events could end that forever. You'd think getting off this rock would be humanity's first priority.
The largest complaint to this post so far is the argument that no one is forcing you to take the money. What I'm trying to say here is that, were dollars not backed by the state, nobody would willingly trade a car for almost any amount of dollars. There are situations where it "isn't stealing" and when it "is stealing".
The same is true with socialism, though the "is stealing" is much more common in our eyes.
Both socialism and capitalism, indeed, all economic models, are just more efficient ways of bartering. Some of them work better than others, and some of them usually lead to abhorrent states. That does not make them evil. That might make them less ideal, but not evil. They both have their positive and negative traits.
I, along with most of you, see capitalism, generally speaking, as superior, but I have no specific grudges against socialism, any more than I have a grudge against ether-based light transmission.
I would like to think that ideas are separate from their implementations. So while all socialist/communist implementations have so far have had negative consequences, it is possible (though unlikely) for one of all the possible implementations to be positive.
From my point of view, unless it is impossible for there to be net positive consequences, no idea is inherently evil. (though, I'm sure to get a lot of flak and some counter-examples for this)
Taking someone else's car in exchange for little pieces of green paper would be called stealing if it wasn't backed by the government.
I agree with the grandparent, here: socialism and communism are not inherently evil ideas, any more than capitalism and federalism.
Thank you.
This just made my day simultaneously funnier and more disgusting.
I don't know about you, but I would call compiz a mainstream window manager nowadays. And yes, compiz has had this for a while.
This is the exact reason I love Alastair Reynolds books. He's said before that if he thinks that something is not possible according to science as we know it today, he won't write it in to the books unless it is absolutely necessary.
In his major trilogy, he only does this twice: inertia suppression machinery and hypometric weapons, both of which were needed to progress the story at an interesting pace. Additionaly, he made it clear that what these devices were doing to space was abhorrently wrong: hypometric weapons gave everyone that looked at them the willies, and inertia suppressors could edit a man out of history entirely, not only killing him but removing any proof he ever existed at all. Both of these were stolen from cultures after many millions of years of space flight. Even his impossibilities begin to seem reasonable.
Also, I put forth Reynolds as the example of Sci-Fi that continues to amaze. His characters are well built, and his plot is beautiful and approachable, even as it accelerates into deep time. It certainly helps that this man clearly knows some physics, and knows what needs to be said to make technologies seem plausible. I mean, when someone detects a spacecraft based on it's specific flavor of neutrino emissions, that's a credit to the author. Even more so when the antagonists begin to use that specific signature to hunt people down one whole book later.
Seriously, unison preforms very well, and it's highly configurable, and cross-platform to boot. I use it to synchronize my music library across multiple hosts, so I can keep up to date on my laptop and mpd server. It's like rsync, with sync rules and no mucking about in serverspace (it runs over ssh).
I usually make some sort of argument against this stance along the lines of "GIMP is just as powerful, but it's different. If you learned with the Photoshop UI/Scheme, you'll always think the GIMP is sub-par". It certainly makes sense to me. I learned with the GIMP, and didn't get my hands on Photoshop until much later. I never much liked Photoshop.
Unfortunately, there is no objective measure of this sort of thing. I consider myself a "power user", as you put it, but then again I'm hardly unbiased. The GIMP does great for what I want it to do, at least, and doing it in Photoshop seems kludgy to me, because I learned how to do it with the GIMP. The GIMP will always be better for me.