We want you to feel part of a world where the conspiracies are so dense and the politics is so thick that, when you join the secret society as a novice at the very beginning, it's this vast organization, and you'll have no idea how it works initially.
That's a little bit too much like real life for comfort. But, like real life, I expect it will be crushingly dissapointing when you finally discover just how simplistic and facile most people's motivations actually are. The complexity of most human systems is essentially an illusion.
I'd rather have universities focus on using a -real- open engine though, such as id's Tech3 (Quake 3) GPL'ed engine: More documentation, bigger community, and an, imo, better engine overall.
I've always wondered if the fact that most Computer Science classes I've come across use source materials fifteen or twenty years old is a hindrance to students going out into the world. Sure, many of the basic principles don't change, but even so... how do you get your head around writing multi-threaded code for a modern game, when the last thing you learned was Hello World in Fortran?
He says you have to give the legal services a chance to establish themselves first, and later raise the fees to a level where the artists get fairly compensated.
Yeah, because everybody knows that new technology always gets more expensive after release, rather than less...
There really hasn't been all that much worth downloading as of late... the new content coming out just isn't all that good, be it games, movies or music.
Finally, an anti-piracy strategy that might actually have an effect. This could save the industry!
the xIAA are targeting P2P users, so people move away from P2P. what's traffic shaping got to do with it?
All the non-techie people I know continue to use P2P like it was the year 2000. It's only the people who know their oats that use any other services or protocols, and most of those guys switched when Metallica went apeshit at the start of the century.
Nothing changed over the xIAA lawsuits, as far as I can tell.
Most certainly the guy doesn't even own the source code since he did it under contract from an employer, so he cannot really "release" what is not his...
Maybe I'm wrong and he owns the source code though.
From the article:
"There won't be problems about copyright, because ERA IT Solutions let me keep it... About the details, why I keep the copyright on this, I can't offer a statement. As already mentioned I agreed to absolute silence. You can speculate now or ask the sources directly. "
I'm not sure why this hasn't been tagged correlationisnotcausation yet. But I'm pretty sure that the more tenuous a story's facts, the less people bother to read the article. And you know what that means?
Well, nothing. But it deserves further investigation.
If a game is released on PC, Xbox, and PS3, and you can't tell which platform it was developed on, because all three are so well implemented... then only a pedant would think of it as a port.
If it feels like it should be on a console, then one is likely to consider it a port, even if the development was done primarily on a PC, for a PC.
In other words, whilst not being particularly technically accurate, 'port' is a word that gets thrown around precisely because it is obvious that not all the pieces fit.
so next time you get made redundant because your employer couldn't sell any products due to people helping themselves to them, I'm sure you will just smile and say
"its fair enough, money isn't important"
if you really believe that, North Korea will welcome you with open arms. Funny how communism never really took off as an economic success isn't it?
You're a zealot, Cliff. Listen to what I'm saying.
All I'm putting forwards is the idea that if pursuit of money gets in the way of the REASON for money, then this is a bad thing, and a shortsighted act.
I'm not saying rob the artists. I'm not saying down with copyright. I'm not saying abolish money.
The only thing I'm even suggesting is that our current government has its priorities wrong. We're talking about an industry that EXISTS TO SUPPORT creative endeavor having a negative effect on that creative endeavor through pure, blind greed - and our government going along with it because pure, blind greed is their calling card.
explain to my landlord why money isn't important, and ill be happy to reverse my position on copyright.
People who make a living from creating digitally encodable products actually have the same bills to pay as everyone else.
He doesn't want the money for its own sake - he's got plans for it. You're missing the point. Money is what we use as a standard for trade. The things we are trading are the only things of value. People who want money simply because it is money are sick, or stupid, or both. It is useful only as a potential.
What I'm worried about is that our current government worships money for its own sake. They're like the new rich - greedy, and endlessly corruptible. They'll defend industry at the cost of the arts - and I think this is probably where we'll agree - the arts need a chance to grow!
Bullshit. Its acceptance by the mainstream media shows the irrelevance of the mainstream media. The fact that a behaviour casually classed as 'criminal' by newspapers is engaged in by such a large portion of the population shows they haven't won anything. Furthermore, the proportion of the population that does engage in this 'criminal' behaviour is disproportionately young.
But the mainstream media aren't irrelevant.
Those of us reading/. constitute the tiniest minority, and we are precisely those educated in this field. The majority absolutely do believe what the mainstream media tell them.
Sure that doesn't stop people copying, any more than a notice in the Times about casual theft in the workplace would stop Joe Bloggs from taking home a few ballpoints or a ream of paper.
But the damage is done. Yes, even those kids who download anyway believe that it is stealing. They just don't care.
They'll care when it lands them a criminal sentence. And the laws criminalising it will be much easier to pass because, trust me, every teenager I know, and I'll warrant every teenager they know as well, fully believes that copying is stealing.
It's starting to look like the war is over, and the lobbyists won. I doubt they even have to work that hard any more. The perception of the population has been changed.
Copying is stealing.
The very fact that we're willing to accept that sentence for discussion shows how far things have come. Stop and think about it, taken out of context. How Orwellian it sounds!
Now that every uninformed member of society believes that copying is a criminal act, well of course it should be criminalised. That only makes sense.
I do believe that artists and creators need to be rewarded. But more and more I'm coming around to the notion that we should scrap the whole bloody slab of law that covers IP, and start again with something sensible.
That won't happen of course. It seems that preserving industry and building capital is the single only motivation for existence in this brave new Labour world.
What ever happened to the notion that money is not valuable in and of itself, but only as a means to the ends we choose?
And you've missed the point of what I was saying. This guy is arguing that you don't need to reinvent the wheel (or leg, or arm, or whatever) every time you program a robot. This is what I was exploring when I tried to separate the 'cerebellum' part of the robot code from the 'cerebrum' part of the code. No need to get pissy about it.
I'm really not being that pissy. I've got a lot of respect for what you were doing. However, in the context of this discussion about standardising robotics, you popped up and, essentially, said 'Yeah, I did some robotics once'.
That's about the only way you could talk about your involvement in robotics and not impress me, so I called you on it.
It was a university project, an experiment to see if something worked. It wasn't an attempt to create an industry standard, just to find out if such a thing were possible.
But creating an industry standard is the point of the article.
If you weren't trying to do that then you were in fact just one of many robotics developers doing their own thing. This article is just precisely about getting past that way of working.
Far from attempting what the article is talking about, only years in advance, you were in fact part of what this article considers to be the problem.
I had a crack at this ~2002... hearing others think along the same lines reassures me a little that the concept wasn't quite as nutty as I had feared.
So let me get this straight - you set out to create a standardised robotics language, and didn't work with anybody else at all? I think I can tell where it might have gone wrong; the bit where you standardise something usually involves other people - sometimes even people who might also be thinking along the same lines.
Content may well be accurate, but there are no original points here.
And accurate or not, I'm not sure we should be thrilled to see the most pompous and tenuous form of new media preaching to the converted on the death of the old media.
"Don't be ridiculous. The BBC ran that show on a terrestrial, free-to-air channel with no parental controls, and very likely chose to make cuts so they could show it at a particular time of the evening without attracting too many complaints. HBO is a subscription channel that can be locked down by parents."
It's not a pure comparision, and it's not intended as one. But I think it holds water.
'Free to air channels with no parental controls' does not mean the same thing in the UK as it does in the States. Fifteen years ago, there wasn't much else in the UK for many families, and they still managed to push the boundaries on those four channels. We have a watershed, it's well understood. Kids don't watch TV after 9pm, unless their parents want them to see, say, Rome in all its glory.
There was nothing in that series that should not have been shown after the watershed, and there was nothing in that series that the censors would have jumped on. The BBC self-censored, because they didn't want to upset anyone. That kind of crap is NOT what we have come to expect.
Yes, the UK is turning into a strange parody of itself with its attempts to close the government to the public on the one hand and monitor citizens very closely on the other. But it's not the only game in town. Despite my own country's recent 8 year slump towards the same type of fascist state as Britain, the US scientific community is still one of the best and most open in the world.
The UK's decline is recent, too. We used to watch the news and laugh at the social conservatism, outrageous media hyperbole and occasional fascist policy of the US. Now we're worse, much worse, and it invades every part of our lives.
Hell, the BBC now cut shows that air, uncut, on HBO. What they did to 'Rome' was a crime. The idea that US tv would one day be more free to explore the dark side of life than the UK never even occurred to me.
Since this attitude of fear so closely follows the desperate, terrified, nannying of the Labour government I am begging and praying that things turn around again when they're out on their ear.
If Bioshock 1 is any indication on how Bioshock 2 will turn out I'm not holding my breath for it.
Well, you might as well hold your breath anyway. It's not like you'll die or anything. The worst that will happen is that you'll respawn six seconds away from your current position.
I saw this article and couldn't figure out why I would want to run an x86 emulator in my browser, so I clicked to see other people's comments. Apparently no one else on slashdot can figure out why someone would want to do that either.
Are you serious? Just imagine those things running in a Beo^H^H^H Firefox Cluster!
Slashdot Mirror
We want you to feel part of a world where the conspiracies are so dense and the politics is so thick that, when you join the secret society as a novice at the very beginning, it's this vast organization, and you'll have no idea how it works initially.
That's a little bit too much like real life for comfort. But, like real life, I expect it will be crushingly dissapointing when you finally discover just how simplistic and facile most people's motivations actually are. The complexity of most human systems is essentially an illusion.
I'd rather have universities focus on using a -real- open engine though, such as id's Tech3 (Quake 3) GPL'ed engine: More documentation, bigger community, and an, imo, better engine overall.
I've always wondered if the fact that most Computer Science classes I've come across use source materials fifteen or twenty years old is a hindrance to students going out into the world. Sure, many of the basic principles don't change, but even so... how do you get your head around writing multi-threaded code for a modern game, when the last thing you learned was Hello World in Fortran?
Consider that today, you can be gay and a programmer, and nobody cares except the bigots. That's as it should be-- except we need fewer bigots.
Meh, there's nothing so pathetic as a lonely bigot.
He says you have to give the legal services a chance to establish themselves first, and later raise the fees to a level where the artists get fairly compensated.
Yeah, because everybody knows that new technology always gets more expensive after release, rather than less...
There really hasn't been all that much worth downloading as of late... the new content coming out just isn't all that good, be it games, movies or music.
Finally, an anti-piracy strategy that might actually have an effect. This could save the industry!
the xIAA are targeting P2P users, so people move away from P2P. what's traffic shaping got to do with it?
All the non-techie people I know continue to use P2P like it was the year 2000. It's only the people who know their oats that use any other services or protocols, and most of those guys switched when Metallica went apeshit at the start of the century.
Nothing changed over the xIAA lawsuits, as far as I can tell.
Most certainly the guy doesn't even own the source code since he did it under contract from an employer, so he cannot really "release" what is not his... Maybe I'm wrong and he owns the source code though.
From the article:
"There won't be problems about copyright, because ERA IT Solutions let me keep it... About the details, why I keep the copyright on this, I can't offer a statement. As already mentioned I agreed to absolute silence. You can speculate now or ask the sources directly. "
Well, nothing. But it deserves further investigation.
If it feels like it should be on a console, then one is likely to consider it a port, even if the development was done primarily on a PC, for a PC.
In other words, whilst not being particularly technically accurate, 'port' is a word that gets thrown around precisely because it is obvious that not all the pieces fit.
so next time you get made redundant because your employer couldn't sell any products due to people helping themselves to them, I'm sure you will just smile and say "its fair enough, money isn't important" if you really believe that, North Korea will welcome you with open arms. Funny how communism never really took off as an economic success isn't it?
You're a zealot, Cliff. Listen to what I'm saying.
All I'm putting forwards is the idea that if pursuit of money gets in the way of the REASON for money, then this is a bad thing, and a shortsighted act.
I'm not saying rob the artists. I'm not saying down with copyright. I'm not saying abolish money.
The only thing I'm even suggesting is that our current government has its priorities wrong. We're talking about an industry that EXISTS TO SUPPORT creative endeavor having a negative effect on that creative endeavor through pure, blind greed - and our government going along with it because pure, blind greed is their calling card.
explain to my landlord why money isn't important, and ill be happy to reverse my position on copyright. People who make a living from creating digitally encodable products actually have the same bills to pay as everyone else.
He doesn't want the money for its own sake - he's got plans for it. You're missing the point. Money is what we use as a standard for trade. The things we are trading are the only things of value. People who want money simply because it is money are sick, or stupid, or both. It is useful only as a potential.
What I'm worried about is that our current government worships money for its own sake. They're like the new rich - greedy, and endlessly corruptible. They'll defend industry at the cost of the arts - and I think this is probably where we'll agree - the arts need a chance to grow!
Bullshit. Its acceptance by the mainstream media shows the irrelevance of the mainstream media. The fact that a behaviour casually classed as 'criminal' by newspapers is engaged in by such a large portion of the population shows they haven't won anything. Furthermore, the proportion of the population that does engage in this 'criminal' behaviour is disproportionately young.
But the mainstream media aren't irrelevant.
Those of us reading /. constitute the tiniest minority, and we are precisely those educated in this field. The majority absolutely do believe what the mainstream media tell them.
Sure that doesn't stop people copying, any more than a notice in the Times about casual theft in the workplace would stop Joe Bloggs from taking home a few ballpoints or a ream of paper.
But the damage is done. Yes, even those kids who download anyway believe that it is stealing. They just don't care.
They'll care when it lands them a criminal sentence. And the laws criminalising it will be much easier to pass because, trust me, every teenager I know, and I'll warrant every teenager they know as well, fully believes that copying is stealing.
Copying is stealing.
The very fact that we're willing to accept that sentence for discussion shows how far things have come. Stop and think about it, taken out of context. How Orwellian it sounds!
Now that every uninformed member of society believes that copying is a criminal act, well of course it should be criminalised. That only makes sense.
I do believe that artists and creators need to be rewarded. But more and more I'm coming around to the notion that we should scrap the whole bloody slab of law that covers IP, and start again with something sensible.
That won't happen of course. It seems that preserving industry and building capital is the single only motivation for existence in this brave new Labour world.
What ever happened to the notion that money is not valuable in and of itself, but only as a means to the ends we choose?
When a movie reminds you of that channel, would you say it's Syfylous?
Actually, that's a sore point.
And you've missed the point of what I was saying. This guy is arguing that you don't need to reinvent the wheel (or leg, or arm, or whatever) every time you program a robot. This is what I was exploring when I tried to separate the 'cerebellum' part of the robot code from the 'cerebrum' part of the code. No need to get pissy about it.
I'm really not being that pissy. I've got a lot of respect for what you were doing. However, in the context of this discussion about standardising robotics, you popped up and, essentially, said 'Yeah, I did some robotics once'.
That's about the only way you could talk about your involvement in robotics and not impress me, so I called you on it.
It was a university project, an experiment to see if something worked. It wasn't an attempt to create an industry standard, just to find out if such a thing were possible.
But creating an industry standard is the point of the article.
If you weren't trying to do that then you were in fact just one of many robotics developers doing their own thing. This article is just precisely about getting past that way of working.
Far from attempting what the article is talking about, only years in advance, you were in fact part of what this article considers to be the problem.
I had a crack at this ~2002... hearing others think along the same lines reassures me a little that the concept wasn't quite as nutty as I had feared.
So let me get this straight - you set out to create a standardised robotics language, and didn't work with anybody else at all? I think I can tell where it might have gone wrong; the bit where you standardise something usually involves other people - sometimes even people who might also be thinking along the same lines.
That won't happen until we have Windows RE. (Yep, Robot Edition!)
I actually read that as Windows Reboot Edition.
Robotics is at the stage where personal computing was about 30 years ago,' says Chad Jenkins of Brown University.
So, completely free of AOLers, women, and social skills? Ah, the halcyon days.
And accurate or not, I'm not sure we should be thrilled to see the most pompous and tenuous form of new media preaching to the converted on the death of the old media.
It's not a pure comparision, and it's not intended as one. But I think it holds water.
'Free to air channels with no parental controls' does not mean the same thing in the UK as it does in the States. Fifteen years ago, there wasn't much else in the UK for many families, and they still managed to push the boundaries on those four channels. We have a watershed, it's well understood. Kids don't watch TV after 9pm, unless their parents want them to see, say, Rome in all its glory.
There was nothing in that series that should not have been shown after the watershed, and there was nothing in that series that the censors would have jumped on. The BBC self-censored, because they didn't want to upset anyone. That kind of crap is NOT what we have come to expect.
Yes, the UK is turning into a strange parody of itself with its attempts to close the government to the public on the one hand and monitor citizens very closely on the other. But it's not the only game in town. Despite my own country's recent 8 year slump towards the same type of fascist state as Britain, the US scientific community is still one of the best and most open in the world.
The UK's decline is recent, too. We used to watch the news and laugh at the social conservatism, outrageous media hyperbole and occasional fascist policy of the US. Now we're worse, much worse, and it invades every part of our lives.
Hell, the BBC now cut shows that air, uncut, on HBO. What they did to 'Rome' was a crime. The idea that US tv would one day be more free to explore the dark side of life than the UK never even occurred to me.
Since this attitude of fear so closely follows the desperate, terrified, nannying of the Labour government I am begging and praying that things turn around again when they're out on their ear.
If Bioshock 1 is any indication on how Bioshock 2 will turn out I'm not holding my breath for it.
Well, you might as well hold your breath anyway. It's not like you'll die or anything. The worst that will happen is that you'll respawn six seconds away from your current position.
In other news, the London Stock Exchange will shortly be abandoning the pound, as well.
I saw this article and couldn't figure out why I would want to run an x86 emulator in my browser, so I clicked to see other people's comments. Apparently no one else on slashdot can figure out why someone would want to do that either.
Are you serious? Just imagine those things running in a Beo^H^H^H Firefox Cluster!