frik

Zeta was illegal!

magnussoft/yellowTAB never had a license but distributed a rebranded BeOS 5. After a years long drama they eventually ceased operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA#Criticism

Excerpt from Wikipedia article:

  "Zeta had no legal rights to distribute the BeOS software, 
  much less open source any of it, as the rumours had it.
  [...]
  The main reason that there hasn't been a public statement 
  previously is that dealing with this matter legally, in 
  Germany, is an expensive undertaking and--given the 
  apparently small amount of funding behind Zeta in its 
  various incarnations--we'd only be in a position to spend 
  significant money and legal time to make a point.
  [...]
  We have sent "cease and desist" letters to YellowTab on a 
  number of occasions, which have been uniformly ignored. If 
  Herr Korz [Bernd Korz, Former CEO of yellowTAB] feels that 
  he holds a legitimate license to the BeOS code he's been 
  using, we're completely unaware of it, and I'd be 
  fascinated to see him produce any substantiation for that 
  claim.”
  — David Schlesinger, Director, Open Source Technologies. 
  ACCESS Co., Ltd., Access 'Completely Unaware' of Legitimate 
  Zeta License

To your "YellowBook" point, yes, looks like possibility.

And several Apple software like Safari 5 for Windows and iTunes already ship with macOS UI libraries ported to Windows. So in near future iOS apps may run on macOS and Windows - quasi true universal apps (not the UWP-crap)

You are right. But speaking out the truth isn't compatible with HN users as of late. So see downvoting and getting flagged as a sign you are right, just the other try to hide your post and keep you from posting. Unfortunately the atmosphere got really toxic, with many things got hidden from users, the down-voting/flagging does no good.

Article reads like being from a crumpy snarky old age dev who lives in his XML-land filter bubble of the 1990s. Go back to XMLRPC and SOAP please. This site is getting more of these corporate old farts lately that don't want to adjust at all. I wish the time back when this site was about startup news, VCs, and new exiting things and not about whining and boring stuff.

Great blog post. Maybe he will post another article about MGSV5 open world rendering, as it's one of the highlights of the Fox engine.

Anyway RAGE engine from Rockstar (GTA IV+V, RDR 1+2) is probably one of the most advanced engines, so much details in rendering.

http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphic...

A detailed comparison of open world game engines would be interesting with focus on LOD, streaming and rendering techniques.

  * RAGE (GTA5/RDR2)
  * AnvilNext (AC:O, GR:Widelands)
  * Frostbite3 (NfS:Payback, SW:Battlefront2)
  * Just Cause 3
  * Watch Dogs 2
  * Mafia 2/3
  * Dunia (Far Cry 4/5)
  * Decima (Horizon Zero Dawn)
  * Fox (MGSV)
  * REDengine (Witcher 3)
  * Minecraft (Java + new C++ Bedrock ed)
  * Genome (Elex)
  * CryEngine/Lumberyard
  * Unity
  * Unreal 4 (PUBG)

It's impressive how such game engines provide seamless high speed travel with vehicles (cars, airplanes) in an open world environment.

> I've learned to not give a rat's ass about downvoters.

Well. I wouldn't care that much too.

BUT HN comment rely on an invisible karma value and if it is below a certain threshold, the accounts "suffers" aka, certain functions have no visible effect. Then suddenly upvoting other comments/stories doesn't do anything (looks fine to you, but doesn't increase the value for everyone but you) and your comments start with an (invisible) negative score, so you will find your comments instantly on the bottom, almost no matter how many upvotes. It's an intransparent system, and it used to be more transparent, when HN was still open source software. Correct me if I am wrong, but that's how I experienced it and put together the puzzle. I certainly would prefer if there would be only upvotes (like Facebook) and no downvotes/flagging - it doesn't work anymore, the community got too big and changed.

As Fox aka (Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc.) got acquired by Disney yesterday and is in the HN news. This news (Fox-IT) is about a completely different company from another continent!

"Disney to Acquire Twenty-First Century Fox" (thewaltdisneycompany.com) 533 points by mxfh 23 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15921692

Fox-IT is unrelated to Fox, so it's not the internal IT department of Fox. Fox-IT seems to be a company from Netherland.

@downvoters: what's your problem? I wasted 5min reading the news, until I found out that it's a minor known company, and not related to "Fox". And then I inform others on HN, but then I get downvotes, yeah right - toxic

17 days ago, Western Digital announce "Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a Year":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15801044

And one needed only calc one and one together to came to the conclusion WD will use RISC-V as HDD controller - yet my comment got down voted on HN. It would be better if HN only has upvotes, and no downvoting/flagging feature and instead a "report" button.

Look at "R" programming language, or look at "JavaScript" (-> TypeScript).

They still do the EEE strategy. Fool me once...

What's wrong with W3C again? Are we on the same train we were with the ill-fated XHTML 1 strict and XHTML 2.

Anyway what's going on anyway with Google+Microsoft+Apple+W3C, why is there such a big push to HTTPS and HTTP/2, and declaring old HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1 and HTTPS/1 and HTML5.0 as legacy!? And why is Mail still sent in plain text completely insecure, and no adoption hype to support SMIME/etc? It is beyond fishy. Or is it just pure greed, no one cares about non-walled-garden-open-web (aka everything has to live in LinkedIn/FB/AppStore/PWA) and there is no money in mail?

Does Source ship nowadays with a recent Havok physics library nowadays?

I heard they used to use an decade old physics library that just got bought by Havok company in the meantime and has nothing to do with the Havok physic engines everyone knows.

Yeah, I am still mad at Chris Roberts that he sold his former company "Digital Anvil" to Bill Gates / Microsoft in 2000.

Of course "Freelancer" (hyped like "Star Citizen" today, and basically the very same game idea) came out late and most announced features were missing - actually the same features are now announced again by Chris Roberts for Star Citizen.

And another game of "Digital Anvil" never got released thanks to Microsoft, it was called "Loose Cannon". It was announced in 1998 and it would have been the first 3D open world game in the very same sense of Grand Theft Auto 3, just released 1-2 years before GTA 3 !! Nowadays we could be playing Loose Cannon V and no one would play GTA. Anyway "Loose Cannon" was very good looking for it's time, and the actual gameplay video footage back then looked really promising. Barely any media can be found online today, but much more is on CD-ROMs of old PC Game mags (1998-2001 era):

https://www.unseen64.net/2008/04/15/loose-cannon-xbox-cancel...

http://www.ign.com/games/loose-cannon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Anvil

Like the poster above me, I say the same: "Fool me once..." to both Chris and Bill.

What will happen to the Nakatomi Plaza / Fox Plaza (skyscraper in LA). Would like to see a remake with little CGI, like the original Die Hard 1/2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Plaza_(Los_Angeles)

Microsoft login is still the very old Hotmail login dating back to 1996 or so. The Hotmail mail and account system got rebranded several times like MSN, Live, Outlook, Microsoft ID, etc.

Well, a login system is a very central part, and other websites suck too, like Amazon still uses the old account login page since 1996 too. But Microsoft redirects way too often, it is worse.

Apple and Microsoft products are full prize products, so I fully trusted they don't come with crap. Unfortunately Microsoft alinated their end consumers starting in 2012 with Win8, and Windows 10 and Office365/2016 are well known spying adware ladden. It's telling that Google products, given they are ad-supported, are well behaving and good citizens (e.g. adhere the users privacy settings) while MSFT products released in 2012 (or later) are not. Do like most users stay with Win7 (supported til 2020) and Office 2010, or move away if you can. They won't change except you show them with your money.

> In 1998, Wide-Band Systems demonstrates Gigabit Ethernet running on four pairs of old, rusty barbed wire.

Yet in 2017 we still have only 1Gbit Ethernet in LANs :(

1Gbps = 125 MB/s !!

I am running 1Gbit since 2003 at home. And all f..king home network devices still support only 1Gbit Ethernet. It's not fast enough. When can some network company finally release 10Gbit or 100Gbit Ethernet (copper or fiber) for cheap home usage.

Current "digital" microchips use electric "on" (1) and "off" (0) and base 2 (also called binary) mathematics is used.

Someone explained me quantum mechanics that it supports more states, not just on (1) and off (0), that it can have dozens or hundreds of states. Is this correct / state-of-the-art understanding?

I imagine how cool it would be to have more states, not just 0 and 1. A computer running on more states could encode machine code in fewer instructions, so it could calculate more with the same frequency.

So why downvote me? Either explain me where I got something wrong, or skip it in case you know less than me.

Good that plain JavaScript 5/6 with no framework is still in the top 2 in all related charts. Looking back how many frameworks came and went dodo, I am using only small libraries and stay with plain vanilla JS 5/6.

Writing modern JS is a peace of cake, it's better to understand 100% of the codebase than to use way too much magic APIs. (well I understand the whole computer, all layers, from hardware to operating system, to software - so there is no magic for me, that helps a lot)

Can the idea of quantum computing be simplified/abstracted to say instead of doing binary (0 1) calculations, it do does calculation on arbitrary base? E.g. base 16 (hex) or base 1024?

If this is true, it would be easier to code, and compilers could spit out very efficient machine code.

Increasing the DRAMproduction capacity is good. The memory product prize is very high and in a bubble. When a 16 memory costs more than a high end CPU. This has to end or it will hurt PC/notebook market.

Well not every Hollywood exec especially add value to scripts. And we can thank them for dozens of boring super hero movies.

Nowadays we all know the infamous story of the Ex-Sony Movie Exec Amy Pascal the story is rather distusging.

Everything except coffee capsules/pods/bars. These pre-apportioned single-use container of ground coffee beans produce way too much waste, are 10 times more expensive and are no better than instant coffee.

Your favorite traditional coffee culture that was popular before the hype around coffee capsules/pods/bars are fast, as convinent (fully automatic machines) and taste great.

PHP is unique in several ways: it's especially designed for the web, is a Web framework itself, comes with everything inbuilt, has C/Java syntax, has a shared nothing architecture, replaced VB as the most popular language for beginners, is used by most websites, is easy to use just drop a php file to Apache www dir. You simply can't objectively compare PHP to other languages because it's different to all others, it's unique. And due it's wide spread usage and earlier non-academic approach it still gets (rather unfairly) some bad reputation. Anyway PHP 7.2 is great, and Go too.

> The injection is currently for non-HTTPS only, but I can easily see this situation evolving for the worse as HTTPS becomes increasingly the default.

That's my fear too. This has to be handled by other means and has to stop. If everything is HTTPS you can be sure it gets very unsecure by design, as everyone will upgrade its capabilities and inject you certs, than we would need a new more secure protocol.

Why is email still unsecure and sent in plain text? Why is there hype for HTTPS but everyone is fine with sending mail in plain text yet we have SMIME, etc and no one is using or supporting it.

In reality games cost already $160 not $69!! Gold premium pre-order special edition version plus season pass or seperate DLCs means $160 or even more.

On top of $160 you really think it's fair that one should pay even more for microtransactions and lootboxes!? Only whales are happy with that. The big mass of gamers is getting angry and is looking for pitchforks.

There are publishers that release e.g. Witcher 3 with no DRM, and free DLCs for $60 and got very rich doing so. Or Grand Theft Auto V which is very successful already if you just count the singleplayer sales. It's all about the video game and its quality.

The 3G/4G modem is a different chip with its own ARM CPU. Android and iOS communicate with it over a limited AT-API.

Not too long ago there were casinos and gambling for whales, there were offline board/card games, there were video games.

Then Facebook with FarmVille (2011) came along, and introduced Free2Play aka Pay2Win to everyone. You had to spam friends (exponential scale) with requests to advance OR pay real money - this was for whales.

Since FarmVille (2011) we saw a whole sub-market of Free2Play (most are Pay2Win after a few hours) gambling games, that is based on gamification, gambling and other casino elements and relies on "addicted players" aka whales.

In 2017 this Free2Play crap swooped over to full prized boxed video games for PS4/XBox/Switch/PC. Bad greedy publisher like Warner Bros, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft risked bad PR and shy away decade long core gamers to earn more from 1% whales - Assassin's Creed Origins, Middle-earth: Shadow of War, Star Wars Battlefront 2, Need for Speed Payback - known for Free2Play/Pay2Win elements like microtransactions and loot boxes.

It saddens one, reading between the lines the PR news from Ubisoft yesterday, they are pushing back all three mayor releases a few months, because Assassin's Creed Origin was so successful - to add such Free2Play mechanics now also to Far Cry 5, The Crew 2 and other games?!

There are still several great publisher like Bethesda that release boxed games for 99% core gamers, with proper & great hours long single player gameplay, and NO greedy crap.

  In August 2015, Rockefeller staffers tossed the oversize Rolodex machine 
  ...
  custom-built Rolodex machine that stored about 200,000 3-by-5-inch cards
  ...
  They [cards] now nearly fill a wall of filing cabinet

Any photos of that monster Rolodex machine?

Especially the dirty UI patterns that Amazon uses to trick one into Prime membership is really off putting. No I don't want a Prime, in fact this permanent nagging made sure I decided to never ever want your Prime membership!

Now they even randomly disallow one to buy random items and label them as Prime-only (just for your account, based on recommender engine most like buying habit). Someone should investigate if this is legal.

Is Redis a one-man show? (plus contributors)

I am still using memcached, but consider Redis in future.

I am looking for a Redis-based high-performance message-queue that can be filled from Nodejs and consumed with PHP. Basically a high-performance message-queue that doesn't need dozens of servers to start with.