Blackmoor Vituperative

Almost two years ago, the FSF (Free Software Foundation) started work on the first update of the GNU GPL (General Public License) in over a decade. A last-minute hitch, though, is keeping the license from appearing.

The FSF announced at the May 2005 LinuxWorld Expo that the GPLv3 would be out soon . The project has taken a little longer than expected. At last report, the GPLv3 (GNU General Public License 3) was to be out by early 2007.

According to Peter Brown, the FSF’s executive director, “We continue to work on the details of the GPLv3 as it relates to the situation presented by the Novell and Microsoft deal. We are researching issues related to potential unintended consequences of the language we plan to adopt. As soon as we are satisfied with the results of our research we plan to bring forward the next draft.”

As written, the patent clauses in the Novell/Microsoft agreement do not violate the current terms of the GPLv2. The leader of the FSF and chief author of the GPL, Richard Stallman, explained at a GPL meeting in Tokyo in November 2006: “What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play. Instead, Microsoft offered a patent license that is rather limited to Novell’s customers alone.”

Stallman went on to say that “perhaps it’s a good thing that Microsoft did this now, because we discovered that the text we had written for GPL version 3 would not have blocked this, but it’s not too late and we’re going to make sure that when GPL version 3 really comes out it will block such deals.”

Sources close to the creation of the new version of the GPL believed that correcting this language wouldn’t take long to craft. If so, the GPLv3 would still have appeared by its last scheduled delivery date of January 15, 2007. That did not prove to be the case.

It now appears that there may be one more draft of the GPLv3 before the final version is released. [Sources believe] that the next draft should appear on or immediately before its annual associate member and activist meeting March 27 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

(from eWeek, Where, Oh Where, Is the GPLv3?)

This is crazy. It’s like an arms race: companies like Microsoft keep trying to find new ways to screw people over, and the FSF keeps having to come up with new defenses against them. Well, I’m glad at least the FSF is in my corner.

Adobe Systems has announced the first public alpha release of Apollo, its cross-operating system run-time for Web developers.

The technology is available on the Adobe Labs site.

So… is this good, or evil? I hate to say it, but it sounds to me that Adobe wants to do what Macromedia wanted to do and nearly succeeded in doing: subverting the Internet and turning it into their proprietary product. But I will have to do more research before I make up my mind.

I spent about 5 hours today playing World Of Warcraft for the first time, using a 10-day free trial. I played EverQuest years and years ago, but I have forgotten most of how that game worked, so my main basis for comparison will be Guild Wars, which I have been playing reasonably regularly for about four months.

The look and feel of World Of Warcraft is much more “cartoony” than Guild Wars, and I personally like the landscapes in Guild Wars a lot better. They’re just beautiful, particularly Cantha (the Asian-style continent). I have been to two continents in World Of Warcraft. One is a sort of cartoon forest with lots of graveyards, which is neat in a sort of “Nightmare Before Christmas” way. The other is a large desert, which looks like a cross between the the Flintstones and the desert where Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote had their battles of wits. So far, Guild Wars wins for look and feel.

The interface in Guild Wars is very similar to the one on World Of Warcraft, which is probably to be expected: buttons across the bottom, radar map in the upper right, character status in the upper left. Pretty typical. There are a few things that Guild Wars’s user interface provides that World Of Warcraft doesn’t, and I really missed them. The main thing I miss is being able to see at a glance where friends and foes are on the radar map. If there is a simple way to see who’s around you in World Of Warcraft, I haven’t found it yet. That’s a huge drawback. I do not see the point of having radar at all if enemies don’t show up on it.

The other user interface difference is the keyboard commands for targeting. In Guild Wars, it’s a simple matter to target the closest enemy, or closest friend, and then cycle through them in either direction (from closest to farthest, or farthest to closest). No tedious mousing around and clicking is required. In World Of Warcraft, I initially thought that it didn’t have a targeting key at all, because even though the online guide I found said that you could target the nearest enemy by pressing TAB, nothing happened when I pressed TAB. I eventually figured out that you can only use TAB to target an enemy when you are basically right on top of them. This is another huge drawback, probably even bigger than the lack of a useful radar. It makes fighting an exercise in mousing and clicking and mousing and clicking. Some folks may like that. I find it annoying and primitive.

So far, Guild Wars wins for the user interface.

World Of Warcraft has a much wider variety of available characters than Guild Wars. Guild Wars has three races of humans, and ten classes. World Of Warcraft has ten races and nine classes, although all nine classes are not available to any given race. This gives World Of Warcraft roughly twice as many race+class combinations as Guild Wars. So for character options, World Of Warcraft wins.

I have done a number of quests in World Of Warcraft, and so far they seem on par with the quests one performs in Guild Wars. For quest quality, it’s a tie. However, Guild Wars makes it much easier to track quests than World Of Warcraft does. This ties back into the radar screen: in Guild Wars, you can click the quest and a pointer shows up on the radar screen leading you to it. World Of Warcraft doesn’t do anything like that, as far as I can tell. If it weren’t for internet sites like World Of Warcraft Cartography, I would still be wandering around trying to figure out where to go. So for quest tracking, the clear advantage goes to Guild Wars.

I can’t claim to have fought a statistically significant number of monsters in World Of Warcraft in just five hours, but based on what I have seen so far, I would say that monster variety and the animation quality is roughly on par with Guild Wars. For monster variety and animation quality, it’s a tie.

Both Guild Wars and World Of Warcraft have a penalty for dying, but they each handle it slightly differently. In Guild Wars, the character can either be resurrected on the spot by a teammate or henchman, or the character will appear at the closest shrine. All of the character’s equipment is intact, but her effective level is reduced by a percentage (the character’s actual level and experience gained is unaffected). That “death penalty” is removed either by killing more creatures or by returning to a town, which resets everything. In World Of Warcraft, the player has a choice of either being resurrected at the closest shrine or of running for a while back to her corpse and being resurrected there. Unlike Guild Wars, there is no “death penalty”. Instead, the character’s equipment is damaged (10% if the character runs back to her corpse, 25% if she doesn’t). There may be wrinkles to this in World Of Warcraft that I don’t see yet, but so far, I would say that both games handle death in a reasonable fashion. Tied for handling of character death.

So, for most game-play issues, I would say that the games are about tied. However, due to the user interface issues, World Of Warcraft is a much, much more difficult game to play. I do not mean “difficult” in the sense of being challenging. I mean “difficult” in the sense of one game simply making the task of moving and fighting more tedious and awkward than it needs to be.

So far, I would say that Guild Wars has the clear advantage.

However, I have only played a few hours, up to level 8. It remains to be seen how the game play will change once I get access to more abilities and begin to explore more of the world. By all accounts, World Of Warcraft really shines in this area. I am looking forward to finding out.

Chile Hardware informs us that Intel has launched its Classmate PC in Chile:

Intel has just launched their educational portable computer, Classmate PC, in Chile. This is the first country that has available this sub-notebook which features a Celeron M at 900MHz, 256MB RAM, 2GB of NAND hard drive and runs either Linux or Windows. The retail price is something near 500 dollars and it can only be purchased by government offices. The distribution is in charge of Olidata, the regional partner of Uniwill, an ECS Elitegroup company.

Personally, I’m not sure why anyone would want this PC for $500. For just $100 more you can buy a notebook with significantly better specifications.

(DarkVision Hardware, Intel launches Classmate PC in Chile)

This is not a very good deal, in my opinion. I don’t know, though: maybe laptops cost a lot more in Chile than they do here in the USA.

77.4 percent of all email sent in February 2004 was spam. That is a 2 percent increase from January. (source: MessageLabs)

Personally, well over 90% of the email I get is spam.

In today’s Let’s Be A Little Overdramatic file, a newly released report from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office suggests that networked file and music sharing could harm children and threaten national security.

The November, 2006, report, entitled “Filesharing Programs and Technological Features to Induce Users to Share,” makes two main points across the span of its 80 pages:

• that peer-to-peer networks could manipulate sites so children violate copyright laws more frequently than adults, exposing those children to copyright lawsuits and, in turn, make those who protect their copyrighted material appear antagonistic, and
• file-sharing software could be to blame for government workers who expose sensitive data and jeopardize national security after downloading free music on the job

Interestingly, the report makes numerous references to RIAA and MPAA legal actions against file-sharing activity, as well as cites a 2005 Department of Homeland Security report that government workers had installed file-sharing programs that accessed classified information without their knowledge.

(from Shadow Monkey, File sharing a threat to children and to national security)

Well, now, we wouldn’t want RIAA and MPAA to appear antagonistic, would we? Why, that would be like making Wilhelm Marr look antisemitic. What a gross injustice that would be.

As for the danger to national security, anyone who has ever held a security clearance (me, for example) knows who is to blame for any such security breach: the nut behind the keyboard. Or, to put it another way, what we have here is a poor workman blaming his tools. I can’t even comprehend how anyone could put classified documents on a workstation connected to the Internet, and then install file-sharing software on that workstation, without being aware of the security ramifications. The very concept just baffles me. Were the InfoSec people asleep?

Anyway, here are links to the report. I wonder how much MPAA and RIAA spent to underwrite it?

PDF version
HTML version

Microsoft Office program manager Brian Jones, whose work has centered around the Open XML document format, now says the “format war” with OASIS OpenDocument is officially over. The winner, he claims, is both.

Jones made the statement in a blog post over the weekend following the release by Novell of an Open XML translator for OpenOffice.

Personally, I think this reply in the blog’s comments sums it up nicely:

There never was a war between ODF and OOXML. To declare that the war is over is therefore disingenuous. ODF was designed to be a comprehensive standard for document interchange. To that end, it has been adopted as an ISO standard and mandated by a growing list of organizations and governments around the world.

OOXML, on the other hand, was designed to fit a particular niche. It does that reasonably well, although even a cursory reading of the spec will reveal its poor design and even poorer architecture. There is little likelihood that it will be adopted as an ISO standard.

(from MSDN Blogs, OpenOffice support for the OpenXML formats)

While the US courts recently reaffirmed Microsoft’s FAT patents, the German Patent Federal Court has just dismissed the patent for use in Germany. According to a report in the German news publication Heise Online, the court has denied the protection that the European Patent Office granted to Microsoft under EP 0618540 for a “common namespace for long and short filenames”. This was based on Microsoft’s U.S. Patent No. 5,758,352. The German Patent Court stated that the patent claims Microsoft made are “not based on inventive activity”.

(from OSNews.com, Microsoft Fails to Patent FAT in Germany)

It gives me some small hope for the future when I learn of isolated pockets of good sense out there in the world. Way to go, Germany.

AT&T told an appeals court in a written brief Monday that the case against it for allegedly helping the government spy on its customers should be thrown out, because it cannot defend itself — even by showing a signed order from the government — without endangering national security.

A government brief filed simultaneously backed AT&T’s claims and said a lower court judge had exceeded his authority by not dismissing the suit outright.

(from WIRED Blogs, Spying Too Secret For Your Court: AT&T, Gov Tell Ninth)

Ah, there we go: my cynicism is now back in place. I was feeling disoriented for a moment there.

In a new setback to Microsoft’s public sector business, the influential National Institute of Standards and Technology has banned the software maker’s Windows Vista operating system from its internal computing networks, according to an agency document obtained by InformationWeek.

Tech staffers at NIST, a part of the Department of Commerce charged with promulgating technology standards, are scheduled to meet on April 10 in Gaithersburg, Md., to discuss their concerns about the new operating system, which Microsoft released to consumers in January amid much fanfare and to businesses in December with lesser flair.

According to the formal agenda for the meeting, NIST technology workers will attend a session entitled “Windows Vista Security” to discuss “the current ban of this operating system on NIST networks.” NIST officials weren’t immediately available to comment.

Word of NIST’s Windows Vista ban comes a week after InformationWeek revealed that the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration have both imposed similar blackouts on the operating system, as well as on Microsoft Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7.

(from InformationWeek, Microsoft Suffers Latest Blow As NIST Bans Windows Vista)

If this keeps up, it’s going to restore my faith in the competence of government employees (which I lost when I was around 16). What’s next? Dry water? Chaste teenagers? Proof that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago by an omnipotent creature suffering from MPD?