I really like the BSDs as well. I'm with you on almost everything you said, except you lost me on the last part. I think it may have just been the fact that it was a quick snippet, and I may have interpreted it wrong.

"Relying on GUI config tools, DHCP, and other magic to keep "newbies" from needing to actually learn anything is counter-productive and isn't going to help create new professionals."

I would like to add that an operating system's purpose shouldn't be to create new professionals any more than a car's purpose should be to create new mechanics. It's just a tool. People want to and need to use them that work in fields completely unrelated to understanding the inner workings of computers. Most people shouldn't even have to know what an IP address is. It should just work (preferably with some sense of security, though that doesn't usually chide well with ease of use or obscurity of underlying mechanisms).

You shouldn't need or even care to know anything about radio wave propagation theory in order to watch television, other than the basics of how to set up your antenna (assuming you even watch over the air broadcasts). The same should apply to any consumer operating system. I'd include Ubuntu as a linux distro that is trying to fit into that category as opposed to something like Gentoo or OpenBSD which have different reasons to live.

also, restricting developers from porting and redistributing GPL software through the app store restricts the freedoms of other people to play that free software on the iphone where those particular people do not have the skills to port to the iphone themselves. More and more the GPL seems to be about restricting the freedoms of some people in order to grant freedoms to other people. This is not freedom, even though Rome may have called it freedom at one time.

OS X by itself is cheaper than Windows. Windows is not cheap. Most of us consider Windows expensive and the EULA pretty rough. Your argument has the problem that expensive is relative. I'm sure you're going to say something about adding the cost of the hardware to increase the cost of OS X over Windows, but that does not mean that all of a sudden Windows is cheap. Windows is still expensive even if a generic x86 machine with Windows is cheaper than Mac hardware + OS X. So, any GPL software ported to Windows (assuming it won't run under Wine) is inherently restricting you to an expensive platform (since Linux and BSD are free). If you're talking about pirating Windows then you're just rambling because at that point we're disregarding copyright altogether, which is what the GPL is based on. You also must agree to the Microsoft EULA if the port is using any of their special APIs such as DirectX unless you are going to port it back over to OpenGL. If it is a device driver and you want it signed then you are in the exact same position as on the iPhone

The problem here isn't the platform. The problem is many developers want to be seen as giving away something for free - in most cases nothing will ever come from it - but in actuality they all have their own little vision of free that is not quite like anyone else's. This is why we have licenses, laws, etc etc. Since everyone interprets things differently, you can only go by the letter of the license. If that is not good enough for some people, then they should refrain from giving away software only to complain about how someone uses it later on. Otherwise they can give it into the public domain and make it really free.

btw, iPhone app source code under the GPL does not restrict you to x86 Mac OS X or to the apple store. You can 1) jailbreak your iphone and build the app on a hackintosh, or 2) you can actually do a little bit of work (gasp) and port it to the platform of your choice. If the platform of your choice is the iPhone, then your issue is with Apple, not the distributor. If your platform of choice is a DEC Alpha, then its your responsibility to procure the appropriate hardware and software to build on a DEC Alpha.

that's incorrect. GPLv3 exists because some people thought it was not in the spirit of GPLv2. it may be against the spirit of GPLv3, but that is not GPLv2. They are two separate licenses. No GPL license mandates that anyone has to migrate to a newer one. Hence, software remaining with the GPLv2 do not agree. If this software is released as GPLv2 then GPLv3 isn't even relevant. If they did not believe that the software should be used in the manner it was used in then the authors should have either used another license or created another license that prevented this sort of thing from happening.

The post you originally replied to makes absolutely no claim about H.264.

The poster said use Ogg Theora or any other open codec. That could mean using H.264 if it is an open codec. He merely used Ogg Theora as an example.

Using the example of codec="H.264" for supporting other codecs does not imply that h.264 is a proprietary codec. It is just an example. It is an example of how to support any OTHER codec that is not the one chosen for the specification, including other OPEN codecs..

The poster could have easily said support H.264 and given the example codec="oggtheora" for supporting other codecs. That doesn't imply all of a sudden Ogg Theora is proprietary. It implies that in the example, H264 is chosen and Ogg Theora is supported in this manner..

Contrary to what the original poster posted in the summary, the article is not relating level-based MMOs to games that require player skill (the FPS/RTS reference in the summary). The article is referring to games like Ultima Online that use a character skill-based system. For example, Ultima Online uses skill-points and Guild Wars uses a low level cap(tutorial i a sense) to emphasize the skills you pick up. I believe EVE is also skill-based in the sense that you build up your characters in-game skills as you play. That is not something really related to most FPS/RTS games since they arguably rely on out-of-game player-based skills, not in-game character-based skills.

of course, to clarify, this isn't what the parent is saying in one part since mages can't teleport from anywhere to anywhere, but rather from anywhere to specific pre-destined places. Warlocks also can only teleport others from anywhere TO pre-destined places, but in both cases it seems they fall under the general consensus on this thread as well as other forums this is popping up on that it's instant travel, makes the world smaller, and should be removed. Whether it's instant travel for just a few or instant travel for all, it's still instant travel.

It sounds to me like most of the posters here would agree with removing Mage teleportation and warlock summoning from WoW because it makes the world feel small. Most of them aren't talking lore-wise (some are), just that instant travel makes the world small, period.. Either that or they just don't want others to have that ability unless they play a Mage/Warlock like them.

You also have to be careful to consider whether its a verbatim reprint or not. If they rephrased parts of the original, changed it what-not, then the text is considered a derivative work and falls under copyright (just as a translation is considered a derivative work). If you re-type that work and in the process re-type their 'version' of the original work, you would be infringing the copyright of the derivative work. For the companies and people that reprint these old works, it would definitely be in their best interest to produce non-exact derivatives (look at the many different versions of the Holy Bible for example) which they can then use to detect when someone is typing their copy (which is copyrighted) as opposed to the original copy.

It's similar to AMD and Intel duplicating each others chips and inadvertently copying specific flaws as well (or even the latest ScummVM/Wii case that was on slashdot where the devs noticed the flaw in the game).

HG Wells' War of the Worlds is public domain at this point. However, if you wrote a book or made a new movie by copying the dialog from the Spielberg version then you would be violating the copyright on that derivative work (even if you would have come up with that version on your own with just the original in your mind).

yeah probably 1 in a big-assed-number chance of getting hit by a meteorite, but once someone gets hit, then they probably means there's a 1 in a million chance of that person surviving said hit...

It would only be a good MMO world if players were professions other than adventurers as well (which probably wouldn't be too popular or fun). Taking a world with 10 million adventurers (making up the majority of the world's population) isn't really a world. That's too many heroes. The majority of the people in any world would be the non-adventuring types, which no MMO out there has enough of to compare.

Take any fantasy set you want from books or RPGs (or take non-fantasy history) and you'll find that relatively speaking, the numbers of adventurers/heroes are not even close to that high.

Hence, sandboxes really do emulate a fantasy world more than a single shard, population-wise with relation to adventurers to non-adventurers. This is especially true since it's not a world of millions of people - it's a world of millions of adventurers/heroes, which is not comparable to any fantasy setting out there (well traditional fantasy setting anyhow, not talking Krull or something on a galactic scale).

Too many people are seeing an all or nothing solution - wow/eve or guild wars. I challenge that it doesn't have to be that way. I would suggest going with the Tabula Rasa method, each server 'instance' being the same size as a current WoW server (which is technically instanced by continent). This means you have WoW but with the equivalent ability to instantly switch between servers. It's a win-win situation. The instances are just as populated as they currently are (possibly closer to max if you dynamically allocate/de-allocate servers) with the bonus that you can play on a server with your friend and switch immediately to another one.

It doesn't have to be like Guild Wars. It could simply be WoW with instant (and free) server transfers (well, pretty close, not exactly the same since they would be mega instances instead of servers.

So, at least a middle-ground solution:
Each WoW 4-instanced world server (Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms, Outland/Exodar/Silvermoon, Northrend) is basically a world-instance (similar to but not exactly how Tabula Rasa did it). You can even still display them as separate servers. In reality, assuming they can work the technology (which is what the article is about), a player can switch their character to other instances (from Blackwater Raiders to Shadowmoon) instantly to play with someone else. You can talk to friends and meet up somewhere to play together.

yeah true. it was within the rules, but they probably shouldn't expect a big turnout the next time they ask the public for something or try to garner excitement back into NASA.

rules may be rules and they may be right, but rules and someone acting within the letter of the rules aren't what will affect public opinion. otherwise we'd all be robots.

ask anyone who has played a game with a rules lawyer'.

lol, yeah that's pretty ingenious. I wouldn't do it, but yeah, output is usually the bottleneck - whether across a modem/network connection or even the console. Most of the ones I played on or ran actually used the max turns feature instead of time limit (set by the game instead of the BBS) combined with a max time online that was set by the BBS for the session and/or day - long time ago so I can't remember what they were.

The only way I could think of to solve that problem there and still allow unlimited turns (per the max login time per day of one hour you all had) was use the BBS option to cap the number of logins period :-) I usually set a cap on the max number of logins per day just so nobody would do anything strange, but didn't think of that scenario..

nice memory :-)

really on my way out this time :-)

however, since everyone seems to bring a sports analogy, I thought of one just a bit ago. The analogy about buying the end of the game (buying your win) is a poor one. If you wanted an analogy then the analogy would be basketball/baseball/nascar/football (both incarnations) teams buying high-profile or 'exceptional' players (or vehicles), which they most certainly do all the time. The money that teams (or more so their owners) spend on players, in particular free agent players is very much akin to people buying gear to play the endgame. The gear doesn't guarantee a person a win (or shouldn't) any more than a team paying for a particular player should guarantee a win (and usually doesn't). Millions of people are perfectly fine with the concept of sports and most of them do not think that a team is buying the championship when they can afford to pay multimillion dollar contracts to particular players.

There's your sports analogy - a more accurate one.

have a good one..