That may not be true. Wrapping API calls is one thing, but in this day and age game graphics are driven by shaders primarily - and there's no way even Transgaming can wrap compiled HLSL code into Cg or GLSL. Losing shaders (or writing TWO sets) is a pain in the ass - many developers may switch to OpenGL to obtain a more universally compatible solution. That being said, another possibility is for someone out there to come out with a THIRD shading language that has compilers for both DX and OpenGL, and this is a likely outcome also.
The difference is that during Duke and Doom's time, the Mac platform was losing market share at a rapid pace to Windows - so while profitable for a short while, it eventually became uneconomic to port. Compare with today with OSX's exploding market share - Macs are already a significant minority in the market, particularly with laptops. I do think the tide is turning, but it will be a slow process, and "light" games like the Sims will get ported long before "hardcore" titles like Crysis.
The only doubt in my mind is what this means for DirectX. As an indie game dev I can say without a doubt that the DirectX API is simple and easy to work with, and the level of tool support for HLSL is far better than what we have for GLSL. OpenGL is lagging behind DX, but in this new market where porting is of increasing importance, will we see developers abandoning DirectX in favor of OpenGL?
I don't see anything wrong with Transgaming's approach for existing codebases - why rewrite everything just to get it onto a new platform? IMHO though, it is a bad idea to rely on it as a crutch for future development. Developers need to start looking at cross-platform engines that support OSX natively for new projects, instead of charging ahead with Windows-only engines, relying on Transgaming, Cedega, etc, as a silver bullet.
Nice tinfoil hat theory - but the contract with Apple to provide MS Office on the Mac expired a while ago (2001/2002). If they really wanted to kill Macs by denying their users Office, why did they even bother to release Office on Mac?
IMHO the problem has always been that VB was designed as a low-barrier-to-entry method to getting some quick one-off code to work. Say I wanted to sort my Excel fields in a weird unconventional way, VBA to the rescue! Maybe 20-30 lines of code and BAM, my spreadsheet is beautiful.
But in the midst of all of this MS never provided a "proper" programming interface, thus spawning an ungodly and scary amount of VBA spaghetti-code projects that just won't die. In realizing this they tried to fix it by releasing.NET, a much more "proper" way to program, but failed to release anything resembling VBA in its original simplicity.
IMO you need both. You need the easy scripting language so non-coders can do some simple operations without calling IT, and at the same time you need a REAL language/environment to do large enterprise integration projects.
Another problem is that we will still see lots of 32-bit CPUs in all manners of devices come 2038... I don't think 32-bit will simply drop off the map like that. In that case, even if we STORE dates in 64-bit format, doing any sort of numeric manipulation thereof will be somewhat more complicated.
Well... There's still plenty of "not our problem-itis" going around, which isn't a value judgment per se - people naturally value their local community more, and this value drops off as you get further out. For example, plenty of people (magnitudes more than people who died in 9/11) are dying in Darfur, or any other conflicted region in this world, but yet these topics are usually on the 4th or 5th of the paper, if that, whereas a single local murder gets front page attention.
Easy... estimate the dollar value of the public relations disaster you will face, times the probability of being discovered... if it's STILL less than the cost of recall...
I don't get the bashing here either, but can we refrain from childish AC name-calling? I'm as big an Apple fanboy as it gets, but your post is just incoherent and uncalled for.
doing everything you'd do on a sub-notebook anyway i.e. office, music, video, web.
I'd beg to differ. A good friend of mine has a Eee PC, and while it's certainly a nice device (light and cheap, who can complain?), it's definitely not on the same playing field as this one (or any other ultra-port). For one thing, while you can run OpenOffice easily on the Eee, typing is another story. The keyboard is small enough that anything but light typing (entering URLs, small notes, etc) is an absolute pain. That friend of mine has a full-sized keyboard at home for when he needs to get ACTUAL work done.
Kind of like an iPhone keyboard actually... easier than the status quo to type on, but still not something you'd want to write an essay or report with.
Not to mention you're not going to store all that much stuff on the internal 8GB drive (smaller, since you have to account for apps and OS). And the SD slot becomes a large expense if you want space to compete with ultra-portables. The average Eee PC probably has about 10-12GB of storage, whereas an ultraportable is looking at 60GB+
For some reason I thought when Apple release a sub-notebook that it might be something within a reasonable price range (i.e. less than the MacBooks)
I think it was obvious from day one that this thing would be MORE expensive. Look at other products in its market - the Vaio for example - much more expensive than any of Sony's other non-ultraport laptops. There has always been a large price premium for size, and this is no different.
Last I checked you can't squeeze 5 hours out of a MacBook. With some extreme power saving measures you might be able to top 4.5h, but at that point you'd be afraid to even squint at the dimly lit screen.
I'll corroborate parent's post. As a college student there's really no better way to look good than to contribute to open source, which may be a selfish reason to participate, but eh. I contributed some code a while back to phpBB, and did some mods on it that weren't ever in the trunk, but were released for free. Lo and behold that impressed an interviewer and landed me a pretty sweet internship. Honestly speaking, though, contributing to FOSS projects at least keeps you sharp, and gives you something to talk about in an interview, should it come up (and it does, very, very often).
Note: I am from Canada, so your systems may differ.
Due process in a public college is generally very well laid out. For us discipline at a normal level (e.g. cheating, plagiarism, etc) is handled by two appointed professors from your faculty, who submit a recommendation for action after having interviewed you and reviewed all relevant facts regarding the incident(s).
For discipline at the highest level, though, it is similarly well laid out - a council of faculty members and student representatives meet to hear it out, court room style, with transcripts and audio tapes available to anyone who requests it. It seems pretty fair on the surface, until you realize that EVERY university I've ever been to has a notwithstanding clause in the rules - i.e. the president, dean, or anyone high enough, can simply consider the decision of the council as a recommendation. It's like the electoral college in the US, I suppose. While the "due process" is fair and transparent, they have no teeth with regards to the final outcome.
The key with vodka jelly is to not get too greedy. The more alcohol you put in the lower the freezing point gets, until your fridge cannot even freeze the solution. Last time I tried it I ended up with jello goop, nothing solid. But then again, I stuck half the bottle in there that time...
I object to the Darwin Awards because they, well, make a mockery of Darwin and his theory. What we're talking about is social darwinism, an idea that Darwin himself never proposed nor supported, and under the banner of which many heinous, racist, and terrible things were done to minorities. The whole idea that dumb people are undeserving of life (so much so that we can point and laugh at the ones who perish) is so... fascist... that it scares me.
I agree somewhat. I'm not sure what the market is like for sysadmins and other network/support guys, but in the CS programmer world things are heating up rather quickly. I'm currently in third year engineering and I've already got companies beating down the school's doors to get the first crack at recruiting our students. Seriously, it's been the first week of the school term and already 5 employers have visited campus in huge recruitment drives, both for new grads and interns.
In the midst of all this, there are still a handful of companies who pay well below the (new) average (which the school does publish for both new grads and intern pay), and refuse to be competitive with benefits. There are companies out there offering me $15/hr, with travel arranged by myself... and then there are companies who will double that, fly me out for free, and give me all the perks the full-timers enjoy.
That being said though... a lot of students still have unrealistic expectations about their pay. A colleague of mine, in computer engineering, can't code for shit, but somehow expects to get hired by Google for no less than $90K right out of school. The market figures these guys out though - after being employed for 6 months with no callbacks, these guys start straightening themselves out and realizing their place in the pecking order of coders.
I hear ya there. Just yesterday I was having lunch with a friend of mine, who's a devout Christian. He asked me if I was Christian, and I told him no. He was surprised, probably because I've been in some tough spots with this guy academically (low marks, easy opportunity to cheat without anyone ever finding out), and have proven my moral character many times. I think he was under the impression that anyone with good morals must be inference be a good Christian!
He then goes on to give me his story about finding God. He dismissed the Mormons, Catholics, and Jehovah's Witnesses, saying that their interpretation of scripture is based entirely upon dogma (hah!), and that they have no substantial proof of anything (hah!), and also claims that the Book of Mormon cannot be a valid text, since it was written by some crazy dudes (similar to something else?)... All in all, every reason he gave for rejecting one religion or another to me sounded like reason enough to reject Christianity itself.
What surprised me most was that his reasons for rejecting certain religions were the exact same arguments I would use, except in my case Christianity didn't get a free pass. Odd.
Is it really any worse than the status quo? At least in this way we'll get some reasonable rates and universal broadband access (the lack of which will increasingly handicap an individual in this society). It's not as if the NSA can't tap your phone as it is, despite them being owned by private enterprise!
I say let private companies run the networks. Charge them to use the network based on subscriber volume, and allow people who maintain or expand the network to apply their expenses towards deferral of these fees. This gives companies incentives to help build the network, instead of leaving the whole thing to the government. It also gives the little guys room to compete - anyone with the money to pay for network access can compete with even the largest providers. In Canada we have mandatory government-regulated wholesale of DSL lines as an anti-monopoly measure. It works beautifully. I'm with an ISP that has great customer service, great prices, and all of the niceties of free competition. We need this in the cable, telephone, and mobile markets.
I'll get upset when it gets in my way. Getting all frothy and bothered about something before it happens is the luxury of those with too much time on their hands.
Yes... and Y2K was just a whole lot of whining. See? Nothing happened in the end! Surely all those dollars we spent fixing broken systems didn't do anything, and was just a massive waste of time!
I applaud people being proactive in preventing governmental abuse of power. People who watch vigilantly while the rest of the population cruises by with life, too busy with "more important" things to care, like buying a bigger house, or a faster car, or doing yoga and sipping lattes...
On the contrary. My brother and I are both first-generation immigrants from Asia. Our first language was Mandarin, though we started learning English at a young age (2 years old). We are both into our 20s now, and he can't spell worth shit, while my spelling is far better than even my natively-English peers.
Some skills are innate (and by that I mean influenced by unknown factors during early childhood)... I don't think the inability to spell (and confusing words) is really a problem of learning to speak before learning to write. After all, hasn't it ALWAYS been this way? Yet people of yesteryear seem to have little trouble differentiating their "there, their, and they're".
IMHO it's called not reading enough. One would never make the "they're" mistake if they actually KNEW that it stood for "they are". Likewise, another mistake I cannot stand is "should of" - it reeks of someone spelling by pronunciation (which I suppose goes to support your point), without any understanding of the underlying language ("should have").
Copyright was established as a state-created monopoly, for a limited time, to encourage the creation and diffusion of artistic works. Not to guarantee an endless stream of money to the MAFIAA lawyers.
True, though legalizing piracy altogether is, IMHO, tipping the scale too far to the other side, which is also not a good thing. There are real tangible costs to producing music, movies, and other such doodads, and though I'm all in favor of shorter copyright terms, with stricter limitations on their extendability, IMHO producers must have valid ways to recovering their costs at least in the short to mid-term.
What's causing what, exactly? Does Joe Public support these laws because our Congress critters have scared them into believing they're necesary? Or did Joe Public convince the Congress critters to enact these laws in the first place? My money's on the former.
No, what the public demanded was that they be SAFER. Pointless surveillance programs that do little to catch real terrorists do not do that, though sadly many people have been convinced that they do.
I agree wholeheartedly. In our modern world the internet is as vital to the nation as its roadways. And just like how we don't have our roads privately owned and charging users for the privilege of driving on them, we all pitch into their expansion and maintenance via taxes. So the same we must do for our network infrastructure. The government needs to own the airwaves and the networks, and tax money must go towards supporting them.
More immediately however, we need to really bust the telco/cablecos' balls for collusion. There is absolutely no way cellular and land-broadband rates need to stay at their current state. There is absolutely and obvious collusion going on here, and we need to get them for it.
Here in Canada we've recently launched a governmental investigation into price fixing of chocolate. This is laughable. Here we are going after confectioners, when it is patently obvious that gas stations, telephone companies, and a whole slew of much-more-important vendors are doing the same, and gouging at even worse margins! But I suppose the chocolate industry doesn't buy enough politicians to avoid their wrath...
(However, the idea that Blizzard can claim a trademark on the entire *Craft name space is equally absurd.)
Yes, but in this case the project has clearly used the "Starcraft" name, as opposed to coming up with a clever derivative name.
Who is "stealing" anything, when it's a game engine that simply REUSES the game data from your purchased version of Starcraft? Totally absurd.
Except... the project is distributing art files WITH the download (as opposed to converting them from your existing SC disc), so yes, it is stealing (or infringement, if you want to be anal about it). Further than that, though, as an amateur game developer I consider it poor form to use someone else's fame to attempt to elevate your own. While certainly not illegal in any sense, IMHO any real game designer will take what makes Starcraft fun and create their own, independent game with it. Let the game stand for itself and be judged for it, not because you're some silly ripoff of the original Starcraft.
FWIW, I've already seen consumer confusion stem from this whole business. I was shocked when I returned to campus this week and found that some of my college friends now erroneously believe that Blizzard is working on a DS port of Starcraft, and that the screenshots shown were just leaks. Blizzard has already tangibly been harmed by this whole business, which leads again to my wholehearted opposition to creating derivative works, for profit or otherwise. Get some originality or don't make games at all.
This is one of those cases where I agree with copyright in its current state. Allowing these guys to build their game is downright dangerous for Blizzard. If their work is sub-par, but uses the Starcraft name and artwork, it can contribute to consumer confusion in the marketplace, and affect Blizzard's own reputation negatively for no good reason.
Building on top of the work of others is creating your *OWN* RTS, but taking the mechanics that make Starcraft so much fun and making them your own. It is *NOT* stealing artwork, music, and storyline that somebody else has spent the time crafting.
And copyright law in its current state doesn't prevent anyone from doing that. These guys can make a game that *plays* exactly like Starcraft and be legally in the clear.
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That may not be true. Wrapping API calls is one thing, but in this day and age game graphics are driven by shaders primarily - and there's no way even Transgaming can wrap compiled HLSL code into Cg or GLSL. Losing shaders (or writing TWO sets) is a pain in the ass - many developers may switch to OpenGL to obtain a more universally compatible solution. That being said, another possibility is for someone out there to come out with a THIRD shading language that has compilers for both DX and OpenGL, and this is a likely outcome also.
The difference is that during Duke and Doom's time, the Mac platform was losing market share at a rapid pace to Windows - so while profitable for a short while, it eventually became uneconomic to port. Compare with today with OSX's exploding market share - Macs are already a significant minority in the market, particularly with laptops. I do think the tide is turning, but it will be a slow process, and "light" games like the Sims will get ported long before "hardcore" titles like Crysis.
The only doubt in my mind is what this means for DirectX. As an indie game dev I can say without a doubt that the DirectX API is simple and easy to work with, and the level of tool support for HLSL is far better than what we have for GLSL. OpenGL is lagging behind DX, but in this new market where porting is of increasing importance, will we see developers abandoning DirectX in favor of OpenGL?
I don't see anything wrong with Transgaming's approach for existing codebases - why rewrite everything just to get it onto a new platform? IMHO though, it is a bad idea to rely on it as a crutch for future development. Developers need to start looking at cross-platform engines that support OSX natively for new projects, instead of charging ahead with Windows-only engines, relying on Transgaming, Cedega, etc, as a silver bullet.
Nice tinfoil hat theory - but the contract with Apple to provide MS Office on the Mac expired a while ago (2001/2002). If they really wanted to kill Macs by denying their users Office, why did they even bother to release Office on Mac?
IMHO the problem has always been that VB was designed as a low-barrier-to-entry method to getting some quick one-off code to work. Say I wanted to sort my Excel fields in a weird unconventional way, VBA to the rescue! Maybe 20-30 lines of code and BAM, my spreadsheet is beautiful.
But in the midst of all of this MS never provided a "proper" programming interface, thus spawning an ungodly and scary amount of VBA spaghetti-code projects that just won't die. In realizing this they tried to fix it by releasing .NET, a much more "proper" way to program, but failed to release anything resembling VBA in its original simplicity.
IMO you need both. You need the easy scripting language so non-coders can do some simple operations without calling IT, and at the same time you need a REAL language/environment to do large enterprise integration projects.
Another problem is that we will still see lots of 32-bit CPUs in all manners of devices come 2038... I don't think 32-bit will simply drop off the map like that. In that case, even if we STORE dates in 64-bit format, doing any sort of numeric manipulation thereof will be somewhat more complicated.
Well... There's still plenty of "not our problem-itis" going around, which isn't a value judgment per se - people naturally value their local community more, and this value drops off as you get further out. For example, plenty of people (magnitudes more than people who died in 9/11) are dying in Darfur, or any other conflicted region in this world, but yet these topics are usually on the 4th or 5th of the paper, if that, whereas a single local murder gets front page attention.
Easy... estimate the dollar value of the public relations disaster you will face, times the probability of being discovered... if it's STILL less than the cost of recall...
I don't get the bashing here either, but can we refrain from childish AC name-calling? I'm as big an Apple fanboy as it gets, but your post is just incoherent and uncalled for.
I'd beg to differ. A good friend of mine has a Eee PC, and while it's certainly a nice device (light and cheap, who can complain?), it's definitely not on the same playing field as this one (or any other ultra-port). For one thing, while you can run OpenOffice easily on the Eee, typing is another story. The keyboard is small enough that anything but light typing (entering URLs, small notes, etc) is an absolute pain. That friend of mine has a full-sized keyboard at home for when he needs to get ACTUAL work done.
Kind of like an iPhone keyboard actually... easier than the status quo to type on, but still not something you'd want to write an essay or report with.
Not to mention you're not going to store all that much stuff on the internal 8GB drive (smaller, since you have to account for apps and OS). And the SD slot becomes a large expense if you want space to compete with ultra-portables. The average Eee PC probably has about 10-12GB of storage, whereas an ultraportable is looking at 60GB+
For some reason I thought when Apple release a sub-notebook that it might be something within a reasonable price range (i.e. less than the MacBooks)I think it was obvious from day one that this thing would be MORE expensive. Look at other products in its market - the Vaio for example - much more expensive than any of Sony's other non-ultraport laptops. There has always been a large price premium for size, and this is no different.
Last I checked you can't squeeze 5 hours out of a MacBook. With some extreme power saving measures you might be able to top 4.5h, but at that point you'd be afraid to even squint at the dimly lit screen.
I'll corroborate parent's post. As a college student there's really no better way to look good than to contribute to open source, which may be a selfish reason to participate, but eh. I contributed some code a while back to phpBB, and did some mods on it that weren't ever in the trunk, but were released for free. Lo and behold that impressed an interviewer and landed me a pretty sweet internship. Honestly speaking, though, contributing to FOSS projects at least keeps you sharp, and gives you something to talk about in an interview, should it come up (and it does, very, very often).
Note: I am from Canada, so your systems may differ.
Due process in a public college is generally very well laid out. For us discipline at a normal level (e.g. cheating, plagiarism, etc) is handled by two appointed professors from your faculty, who submit a recommendation for action after having interviewed you and reviewed all relevant facts regarding the incident(s).
For discipline at the highest level, though, it is similarly well laid out - a council of faculty members and student representatives meet to hear it out, court room style, with transcripts and audio tapes available to anyone who requests it. It seems pretty fair on the surface, until you realize that EVERY university I've ever been to has a notwithstanding clause in the rules - i.e. the president, dean, or anyone high enough, can simply consider the decision of the council as a recommendation. It's like the electoral college in the US, I suppose. While the "due process" is fair and transparent, they have no teeth with regards to the final outcome.
The key with vodka jelly is to not get too greedy. The more alcohol you put in the lower the freezing point gets, until your fridge cannot even freeze the solution. Last time I tried it I ended up with jello goop, nothing solid. But then again, I stuck half the bottle in there that time...
I object to the Darwin Awards because they, well, make a mockery of Darwin and his theory. What we're talking about is social darwinism, an idea that Darwin himself never proposed nor supported, and under the banner of which many heinous, racist, and terrible things were done to minorities. The whole idea that dumb people are undeserving of life (so much so that we can point and laugh at the ones who perish) is so... fascist... that it scares me.
I agree somewhat. I'm not sure what the market is like for sysadmins and other network/support guys, but in the CS programmer world things are heating up rather quickly. I'm currently in third year engineering and I've already got companies beating down the school's doors to get the first crack at recruiting our students. Seriously, it's been the first week of the school term and already 5 employers have visited campus in huge recruitment drives, both for new grads and interns.
In the midst of all this, there are still a handful of companies who pay well below the (new) average (which the school does publish for both new grads and intern pay), and refuse to be competitive with benefits. There are companies out there offering me $15/hr, with travel arranged by myself... and then there are companies who will double that, fly me out for free, and give me all the perks the full-timers enjoy.
That being said though... a lot of students still have unrealistic expectations about their pay. A colleague of mine, in computer engineering, can't code for shit, but somehow expects to get hired by Google for no less than $90K right out of school. The market figures these guys out though - after being employed for 6 months with no callbacks, these guys start straightening themselves out and realizing their place in the pecking order of coders.
I hear ya there. Just yesterday I was having lunch with a friend of mine, who's a devout Christian. He asked me if I was Christian, and I told him no. He was surprised, probably because I've been in some tough spots with this guy academically (low marks, easy opportunity to cheat without anyone ever finding out), and have proven my moral character many times. I think he was under the impression that anyone with good morals must be inference be a good Christian!
He then goes on to give me his story about finding God. He dismissed the Mormons, Catholics, and Jehovah's Witnesses, saying that their interpretation of scripture is based entirely upon dogma (hah!), and that they have no substantial proof of anything (hah!), and also claims that the Book of Mormon cannot be a valid text, since it was written by some crazy dudes (similar to something else?)... All in all, every reason he gave for rejecting one religion or another to me sounded like reason enough to reject Christianity itself.
What surprised me most was that his reasons for rejecting certain religions were the exact same arguments I would use, except in my case Christianity didn't get a free pass. Odd.
Is it really any worse than the status quo? At least in this way we'll get some reasonable rates and universal broadband access (the lack of which will increasingly handicap an individual in this society). It's not as if the NSA can't tap your phone as it is, despite them being owned by private enterprise!
I say let private companies run the networks. Charge them to use the network based on subscriber volume, and allow people who maintain or expand the network to apply their expenses towards deferral of these fees. This gives companies incentives to help build the network, instead of leaving the whole thing to the government. It also gives the little guys room to compete - anyone with the money to pay for network access can compete with even the largest providers. In Canada we have mandatory government-regulated wholesale of DSL lines as an anti-monopoly measure. It works beautifully. I'm with an ISP that has great customer service, great prices, and all of the niceties of free competition. We need this in the cable, telephone, and mobile markets.
Yes... and Y2K was just a whole lot of whining. See? Nothing happened in the end! Surely all those dollars we spent fixing broken systems didn't do anything, and was just a massive waste of time!
I applaud people being proactive in preventing governmental abuse of power. People who watch vigilantly while the rest of the population cruises by with life, too busy with "more important" things to care, like buying a bigger house, or a faster car, or doing yoga and sipping lattes...
On the contrary. My brother and I are both first-generation immigrants from Asia. Our first language was Mandarin, though we started learning English at a young age (2 years old). We are both into our 20s now, and he can't spell worth shit, while my spelling is far better than even my natively-English peers.
Some skills are innate (and by that I mean influenced by unknown factors during early childhood)... I don't think the inability to spell (and confusing words) is really a problem of learning to speak before learning to write. After all, hasn't it ALWAYS been this way? Yet people of yesteryear seem to have little trouble differentiating their "there, their, and they're".
IMHO it's called not reading enough. One would never make the "they're" mistake if they actually KNEW that it stood for "they are". Likewise, another mistake I cannot stand is "should of" - it reeks of someone spelling by pronunciation (which I suppose goes to support your point), without any understanding of the underlying language ("should have").
True, though legalizing piracy altogether is, IMHO, tipping the scale too far to the other side, which is also not a good thing. There are real tangible costs to producing music, movies, and other such doodads, and though I'm all in favor of shorter copyright terms, with stricter limitations on their extendability, IMHO producers must have valid ways to recovering their costs at least in the short to mid-term.
What's causing what, exactly? Does Joe Public support these laws because our Congress critters have scared them into believing they're necesary? Or did Joe Public convince the Congress critters to enact these laws in the first place? My money's on the former.
No, what the public demanded was that they be SAFER. Pointless surveillance programs that do little to catch real terrorists do not do that, though sadly many people have been convinced that they do.
I agree wholeheartedly. In our modern world the internet is as vital to the nation as its roadways. And just like how we don't have our roads privately owned and charging users for the privilege of driving on them, we all pitch into their expansion and maintenance via taxes. So the same we must do for our network infrastructure. The government needs to own the airwaves and the networks, and tax money must go towards supporting them.
More immediately however, we need to really bust the telco/cablecos' balls for collusion. There is absolutely no way cellular and land-broadband rates need to stay at their current state. There is absolutely and obvious collusion going on here, and we need to get them for it.
Here in Canada we've recently launched a governmental investigation into price fixing of chocolate. This is laughable. Here we are going after confectioners, when it is patently obvious that gas stations, telephone companies, and a whole slew of much-more-important vendors are doing the same, and gouging at even worse margins! But I suppose the chocolate industry doesn't buy enough politicians to avoid their wrath...
Yes, but in this case the project has clearly used the "Starcraft" name, as opposed to coming up with a clever derivative name.
Who is "stealing" anything, when it's a game engine that simply REUSES the game data from your purchased version of Starcraft? Totally absurd.Except... the project is distributing art files WITH the download (as opposed to converting them from your existing SC disc), so yes, it is stealing (or infringement, if you want to be anal about it). Further than that, though, as an amateur game developer I consider it poor form to use someone else's fame to attempt to elevate your own. While certainly not illegal in any sense, IMHO any real game designer will take what makes Starcraft fun and create their own, independent game with it. Let the game stand for itself and be judged for it, not because you're some silly ripoff of the original Starcraft.
FWIW, I've already seen consumer confusion stem from this whole business. I was shocked when I returned to campus this week and found that some of my college friends now erroneously believe that Blizzard is working on a DS port of Starcraft, and that the screenshots shown were just leaks. Blizzard has already tangibly been harmed by this whole business, which leads again to my wholehearted opposition to creating derivative works, for profit or otherwise. Get some originality or don't make games at all.
This is one of those cases where I agree with copyright in its current state. Allowing these guys to build their game is downright dangerous for Blizzard. If their work is sub-par, but uses the Starcraft name and artwork, it can contribute to consumer confusion in the marketplace, and affect Blizzard's own reputation negatively for no good reason.
Building on top of the work of others is creating your *OWN* RTS, but taking the mechanics that make Starcraft so much fun and making them your own. It is *NOT* stealing artwork, music, and storyline that somebody else has spent the time crafting.
And copyright law in its current state doesn't prevent anyone from doing that. These guys can make a game that *plays* exactly like Starcraft and be legally in the clear.