If these artists want to get paid, they should band together and drop the massive corporations that own their copyrights and instead distribute that content how we want it, and we'll be more than happy to pay them far more than their corporate owners do. Just a thought, you know.
Secure booting -- provides no added benefit and is therefore totally useless (except as a tool of extortion). All we need is partition write locking on OS install. When was the last time you actually heard of malware that touched the bootloading process, anyway?
When Google updates their apps and destroys usability in a similar manner to conform to the retardation of some moronic "new-school" UX designer who just wants to change things around to make it his own while simultaneously throwing over a decade of UX experience and user studies through the window, you have absolutely zero fucking choice on whether you want to upgrade or not. This fundamentally makes Google Apps a non-starter for businesses.
I wouldn't say that's Microsoft's fault, more the fault of IT departments and users trying to overload their knowledge in a poor manner, resulting in the abuse of technologies. Instead of looking for an answer to a technical need, they just say "just throw it in an Excel spreadsheet, we can do that, right?"
Formats supported. I'd still use 2003 over any other version. I'd also still use classic gmail over any other web-based email app, but that's a literal impossibility now, because Google doesn't understand the value of old versions.
Guaranteed victory: don't massively change the interface of your applications for business users without giving them the ability to keep the present version, especially when those changes dramatically change functionality or usability (in case you didn't get the reference, see gmail).
It may be a simple request, but Microsoft is absolutely OWNING you in this realm, it's called consistency and stability. They've done office productivity software for a long time and they got this one right (don't like Ribbon + other bad UI choices?, keep using 2003, and here's a service pack that makes 2003 work with 2007 files!). Learn from them. The cost of re-training thousands of employees because they're used to using software version 1.0 after you FORCE them to upgrade to 1.0.0.0.1b with fancy new UI is more than enough to justify never using your products, ever again.
Unfortunately, it feels like the vast majority of voters are stuck in their childhood-naivety in believing politics is just unimportant and they should just vote for whoever they "like" the most, turning the presidency into a high-school level popularity contest. At this point, why not just give both candidates an FB page and decide who becomes the next president by whoever has the most likes? This is the type of response massive advertising will bring.
Why can't we make this type of advertising illegal for public offices. Perhaps instead, a consolidated web-based resource should be constructed where each candidate (including individuals running separately from any political party affiliation, and without bias towards those affiliations) is given the same space to identify themselves and their beliefs, and which consolidates resources on the person, their activities within government (both positive and negative), and any interviews/debate type questions they've answered. Also, perhaps some kind of Q&A type service (like a reddit AMA, except less chaotic), so that people can get more information on the stances of the candidates. I envision something sort-of like the "we the people" petition system except much more candid and less worthless, since it entails asking questions to a candidate at large and having popular questions answered sincerely (rather than deferring to media shills and mouth-taped panelists being the only ones that get to ask questions outside of showing up at a town hall and hoping you get called on to ask a question). Most importantly, these things would be immortalized, really showing which candidates hold true to their responses, giving us an ability to objectively score winning candidates on their performance going forward.
Then, armed with something like that, where we can actually read up on all the candidates and find ones we align ourselves most with (and more importantly, who appear to be most beneficial to our country), we then head to the court houses to vote. Not this ass-backwards "see a name on TV, go vote for them because he said something you agree with in the commercial" nonsense. Terrible, the current system is.
Up next: televisions that allow you to mute them or turn them off during commercials declared illegal! Also, DVRs that do not prevent you from fast-forwarding through commercials also declared illegal!
From TFA, we're to believe all he did was somehow get GoDaddy to reset the e-mail address on an account, log-in and kill the DNS. This sounds more like an issue with GoDaddy than it does with unlawful access of a computer resource. At best, he impersonated someone? And honestly, the only reason this is on/. or in the news is because he's a public figure. This is hardly something I'd be impressed with even if it were done by an 8 year old child. This isn't hacking, it's just a shining example of why you should avoid GoDaddy at all costs.
This comment was made from my MBP. Truthful comments about Apple products are not the position you think (anti-fanboyism), and your rabid responses are predictable. Have a nice day.
And would you consider me in violation of copyright law if I were to copy a single pixel from a single frame out of a 3 hour long movie?
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
on
Diablo III Released
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· Score: 1
I forgot to mention, but when these emulators are released, likely as open source, Blizzard will be a step behind. We'll be able to create our own mods to the game and enjoy it far more than vanilla. To match and better the emulators, they'd have to let us create custom games much like they have with other battle.net games in the past. This is likely one reason they'll just sue rather than do better.
And unfortunately, since Blizzard and recent SCOTUS rulings have paved the way, we'll be unlikely able to use such an emulator legally because it will violate the game's EULA, so even though it's enforcing an interoperability exclusion that has been used in the past to rule that things like no-CD cracks that are intended to make the lawful copy and unfettered use of a copyright work possible are legal, we'll once again be screwed out of rights guaranteed by copyright law because of this plague that's sweeping the software world called "licensing" which gives companies carte blanche to write their own laws, essentially, even though they've almost unilaterally been unconscionable and horribly biased towards one party, SCOTUS et al continue to uphold them as legal. So I say fuck Blizzard and when they come out, I'll be one of the millions to run a pirated copy to play with my friends.
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
on
Diablo III Released
·
· Score: 1
It's mostly identical. Quest data is on the client, as is item data, and reversing the netcode will explain the available flags on items allowing for an easy enough implementation of randomized items with the different modifiers we see in-game (I've done this in my own emulator for other games with randomized items, it's very simple). Drop rates and stats are not published in the WoW client, these are values approximated by data mining techniques, and WoW pservers pride themselves on the accuracy or quality of their database (which includes these drop rates) and the quality of scripted encounters and monster AI. Spawn types, locations, rates, etc are all similar, not present in the client but mined and used server-side by an emulator. One would create tools to edit these in any moderately professional reproduction.
The only thing that's really difficult to reproduce is level randomization, and it's only relatively difficult. There are many publicly available terrain generation algorithms, and from what I've played in the D3 beta, the levels aren't completely randomized, they're just a few calls to an RNG for each piece with special pieces placed randomly. Think of it like building out a map tree with an entrance, different areas, connecting paths, and primary goal areas (minigames, next-level dungeons, or portals outside of the dungeon). Each one of these map pieces fits together with several others like a puzzle, so one would merely need to construct a graph of all connected pieces for a given dungeon and then build a level tree of some randomized depth and fill it with pieces with one of the leaves containing a primary goal node. There are other subtleties, but that really seems to be about it. That'd be the most difficult part of actually implementing the emulator, getting that part right so the game feels the same. But I really don't think it's even slightly as difficult as you seem to think it is. The hardest part of a game like D3 from an engineering standpoint would be handling the intense load it does (as it's 100% online now) and the massive amounts of content in it. The network protocol and interaction between a login/bnet/game server and the client is surely only minescule compared to the enormity of the game as a whole.
I expect to see fully functioning emulators for D3, and when this happens, either Blizzard will sue them into "nonexistence" like bnetd, or they will fold and give us a LAN-type play as was available in D2. I'd bet they'd sue before giving the community something they want, though. When you reach a certain level of capital, you just don't care what your customers think anymore.
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
on
Diablo III Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This isn't true. The interoperability clause in the DMCA is what makes no-CD cracks legal. A no-internet crack would be legal by the same reasoning. When you start using it to distribute infringing copies of the game, yes, you are violating copyright law, the same way a no-CD crack let you play a ripped copy of older games, despite the crack itself being legal for personal use.
You can run the garmin software on your iPhone or Android phone -- http://www8.garmin.com/apps/. And this is apples to garmins, literally. Apple sells OSX copies separately from hardware (specifically so that you can install it on Apple hardware) but ties that software to their hardware (you are not permitted to install it on non-Apple branded hardware). If garmin sold both a leading navigation suite that had the capability to be run natively on many existing machines but also sold GPS devices for in your car or on-the-go, and then tied the two together stating you cannot install their software on any non-garmin device, you might have a valid comparison. But that's not the case. They sold devices that use their software and that's it. And then when mobile became a larger market, they started selling the software independently of hardware for 3rd party mobile platforms. If Apple sold OSX for PCs, this entire issue would not exist as what Psystar was doing would have been legal.
You're just skirting around the issue. Apple is attacking first sale doctrine by "selling" everything as a license only. SCOTUS denied an appeal to see a sale of software as an actual copy subject to the first sale doctrine. You may see that as fine but it's an astonishingly huge ruling that companies can just sell "licenses" of copyrighted material to impinge the rights of customers granted by copyright law. The ruling against Psystar was to apply the EULA that went along with it, but that's merely consequential of the larger issue.
And Apple certainly does hold a monopoly on hardware that is permitted to run OSX in a non-EULA violating manner. There's no reason the two should be coupled and IANAL but I'd expect there to be a valid case here for Apple's tying of their hardware to OSX as a violation of various antitrust acts. The tying of iPhones to AT&T was upheld as unlawful in 2010, and I'm surprised it wasn't argued that the tying of OSX to Apple hardware (which is, in some cases, up to three times as expensive as identical competitor hardware) is comparable to the tying of Internet Explorer to Windows (which has caused a lot of controversy). Though if OSX is only ever licensed, it doesn't appear that it it would be subject to litigation in this arena. So this license-only thing seems like a huge umbrella of protection for companies and there's certainly no way one can see this as fair to consumers. That is why it's so obnoxious to see the SCOTUS uphold the behavior as legal. It's terrible.
I thought it would be obvious that you'd elevate it in some kind of container, not by just letting it freely escape into our atmosphere. I can imagine designs from a balloon-like apparatus designed to sit at a certain height in our atmosphere and be collected by a series of satellites to something as outlandish as an enormous space-elevator for hydrogen (essentially an enormous tube connected to earth and held in position by inertia and earth's gravity). The only problem with that idea is it requires you constantly maintain the density of gasses at all elevations in the tube. If the tube is airtight, you could potentially fill it with any number of very heavy gasses (moreso than O2/N2). Then you pump hydrogen in from the ground level and it would rise to the top and increase the pressure of the system. With a good distance in density from hydrogen from the filler gas, a very hard barrier should exist at the top of the tube, and at any given pressure, no more hydrogen would be introduced from the ground and several minutes later all hydrogen at the top would be removed (easy, the tube is pressurized, so the denser gas should push the hydrogen right through an opening on the top). Once pressure is re-normalized, repeat. I'm just a software engineer with a very basic understanding of fluid dynamics and Newtonian physics and I don't have any problems coming up with solutions here. Surely Ph.D.s and researchers in this field would be able to create something fantastically efficient.
Gasses can be condensed using temperature as well, imagine this process happening in space, where an absence of heat is abundant. Gaseous hydrogen will gladly float beyond our atmosphere, at which point it can be easily compressed and then gravity will bring it back down to earth. I don't think this problem has to require an enormous amount of energy to solve. And that process of moving hydrogen to space can also generate electricity...
Slashdot Mirror
If these artists want to get paid, they should band together and drop the massive corporations that own their copyrights and instead distribute that content how we want it, and we'll be more than happy to pay them far more than their corporate owners do. Just a thought, you know.
Secure booting -- provides no added benefit and is therefore totally useless (except as a tool of extortion). All we need is partition write locking on OS install. When was the last time you actually heard of malware that touched the bootloading process, anyway?
What part of not being required to upgrade Office did you not understand? Good luck preventing Google from updating your apps.
And yet you don't have to use either.
When Google updates their apps and destroys usability in a similar manner to conform to the retardation of some moronic "new-school" UX designer who just wants to change things around to make it his own while simultaneously throwing over a decade of UX experience and user studies through the window, you have absolutely zero fucking choice on whether you want to upgrade or not. This fundamentally makes Google Apps a non-starter for businesses.
Have you tried office 2003? It's pretty awesome.
I wouldn't say that's Microsoft's fault, more the fault of IT departments and users trying to overload their knowledge in a poor manner, resulting in the abuse of technologies. Instead of looking for an answer to a technical need, they just say "just throw it in an Excel spreadsheet, we can do that, right?"
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/microsoft-office-compatibility-pack-for-word-excel-and-powerpoint-HA010168676.aspx
Formats supported. I'd still use 2003 over any other version. I'd also still use classic gmail over any other web-based email app, but that's a literal impossibility now, because Google doesn't understand the value of old versions.
Guaranteed victory: don't massively change the interface of your applications for business users without giving them the ability to keep the present version, especially when those changes dramatically change functionality or usability (in case you didn't get the reference, see gmail).
It may be a simple request, but Microsoft is absolutely OWNING you in this realm, it's called consistency and stability. They've done office productivity software for a long time and they got this one right (don't like Ribbon + other bad UI choices?, keep using 2003, and here's a service pack that makes 2003 work with 2007 files!). Learn from them. The cost of re-training thousands of employees because they're used to using software version 1.0 after you FORCE them to upgrade to 1.0.0.0.1b with fancy new UI is more than enough to justify never using your products, ever again.
Most accurate and appropriate video ever, and a precisely why Office 365 threatens Google at all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4EbCkotKPU.
Unfortunately, it feels like the vast majority of voters are stuck in their childhood-naivety in believing politics is just unimportant and they should just vote for whoever they "like" the most, turning the presidency into a high-school level popularity contest. At this point, why not just give both candidates an FB page and decide who becomes the next president by whoever has the most likes? This is the type of response massive advertising will bring.
Why can't we make this type of advertising illegal for public offices. Perhaps instead, a consolidated web-based resource should be constructed where each candidate (including individuals running separately from any political party affiliation, and without bias towards those affiliations) is given the same space to identify themselves and their beliefs, and which consolidates resources on the person, their activities within government (both positive and negative), and any interviews/debate type questions they've answered. Also, perhaps some kind of Q&A type service (like a reddit AMA, except less chaotic), so that people can get more information on the stances of the candidates. I envision something sort-of like the "we the people" petition system except much more candid and less worthless, since it entails asking questions to a candidate at large and having popular questions answered sincerely (rather than deferring to media shills and mouth-taped panelists being the only ones that get to ask questions outside of showing up at a town hall and hoping you get called on to ask a question). Most importantly, these things would be immortalized, really showing which candidates hold true to their responses, giving us an ability to objectively score winning candidates on their performance going forward.
Then, armed with something like that, where we can actually read up on all the candidates and find ones we align ourselves most with (and more importantly, who appear to be most beneficial to our country), we then head to the court houses to vote. Not this ass-backwards "see a name on TV, go vote for them because he said something you agree with in the commercial" nonsense. Terrible, the current system is.
Objective-C is to C as Javascript is to Java. Thanks.
We already have a device running that requires an infinite amount of energy: corporate greed. We're still struggling to turn that one off.
Australia sucks. Your women are welcome to venture over to the USA, though :).
Up next: televisions that allow you to mute them or turn them off during commercials declared illegal! Also, DVRs that do not prevent you from fast-forwarding through commercials also declared illegal!
From TFA, we're to believe all he did was somehow get GoDaddy to reset the e-mail address on an account, log-in and kill the DNS. This sounds more like an issue with GoDaddy than it does with unlawful access of a computer resource. At best, he impersonated someone? And honestly, the only reason this is on /. or in the news is because he's a public figure. This is hardly something I'd be impressed with even if it were done by an 8 year old child. This isn't hacking, it's just a shining example of why you should avoid GoDaddy at all costs.
This comment was made from my MBP. Truthful comments about Apple products are not the position you think (anti-fanboyism), and your rabid responses are predictable. Have a nice day.
Small, check.
Reliable, check.
Convenient to use, check.
Inexpensive... whoops.
And would you consider me in violation of copyright law if I were to copy a single pixel from a single frame out of a 3 hour long movie?
I forgot to mention, but when these emulators are released, likely as open source, Blizzard will be a step behind. We'll be able to create our own mods to the game and enjoy it far more than vanilla. To match and better the emulators, they'd have to let us create custom games much like they have with other battle.net games in the past. This is likely one reason they'll just sue rather than do better.
And unfortunately, since Blizzard and recent SCOTUS rulings have paved the way, we'll be unlikely able to use such an emulator legally because it will violate the game's EULA, so even though it's enforcing an interoperability exclusion that has been used in the past to rule that things like no-CD cracks that are intended to make the lawful copy and unfettered use of a copyright work possible are legal, we'll once again be screwed out of rights guaranteed by copyright law because of this plague that's sweeping the software world called "licensing" which gives companies carte blanche to write their own laws, essentially, even though they've almost unilaterally been unconscionable and horribly biased towards one party, SCOTUS et al continue to uphold them as legal. So I say fuck Blizzard and when they come out, I'll be one of the millions to run a pirated copy to play with my friends.
It's mostly identical. Quest data is on the client, as is item data, and reversing the netcode will explain the available flags on items allowing for an easy enough implementation of randomized items with the different modifiers we see in-game (I've done this in my own emulator for other games with randomized items, it's very simple). Drop rates and stats are not published in the WoW client, these are values approximated by data mining techniques, and WoW pservers pride themselves on the accuracy or quality of their database (which includes these drop rates) and the quality of scripted encounters and monster AI. Spawn types, locations, rates, etc are all similar, not present in the client but mined and used server-side by an emulator. One would create tools to edit these in any moderately professional reproduction.
The only thing that's really difficult to reproduce is level randomization, and it's only relatively difficult. There are many publicly available terrain generation algorithms, and from what I've played in the D3 beta, the levels aren't completely randomized, they're just a few calls to an RNG for each piece with special pieces placed randomly. Think of it like building out a map tree with an entrance, different areas, connecting paths, and primary goal areas (minigames, next-level dungeons, or portals outside of the dungeon). Each one of these map pieces fits together with several others like a puzzle, so one would merely need to construct a graph of all connected pieces for a given dungeon and then build a level tree of some randomized depth and fill it with pieces with one of the leaves containing a primary goal node. There are other subtleties, but that really seems to be about it. That'd be the most difficult part of actually implementing the emulator, getting that part right so the game feels the same. But I really don't think it's even slightly as difficult as you seem to think it is. The hardest part of a game like D3 from an engineering standpoint would be handling the intense load it does (as it's 100% online now) and the massive amounts of content in it. The network protocol and interaction between a login/bnet/game server and the client is surely only minescule compared to the enormity of the game as a whole.
I expect to see fully functioning emulators for D3, and when this happens, either Blizzard will sue them into "nonexistence" like bnetd, or they will fold and give us a LAN-type play as was available in D2. I'd bet they'd sue before giving the community something they want, though. When you reach a certain level of capital, you just don't care what your customers think anymore.
This isn't true. The interoperability clause in the DMCA is what makes no-CD cracks legal. A no-internet crack would be legal by the same reasoning. When you start using it to distribute infringing copies of the game, yes, you are violating copyright law, the same way a no-CD crack let you play a ripped copy of older games, despite the crack itself being legal for personal use.
You can run the garmin software on your iPhone or Android phone -- http://www8.garmin.com/apps/. And this is apples to garmins, literally. Apple sells OSX copies separately from hardware (specifically so that you can install it on Apple hardware) but ties that software to their hardware (you are not permitted to install it on non-Apple branded hardware). If garmin sold both a leading navigation suite that had the capability to be run natively on many existing machines but also sold GPS devices for in your car or on-the-go, and then tied the two together stating you cannot install their software on any non-garmin device, you might have a valid comparison. But that's not the case. They sold devices that use their software and that's it. And then when mobile became a larger market, they started selling the software independently of hardware for 3rd party mobile platforms. If Apple sold OSX for PCs, this entire issue would not exist as what Psystar was doing would have been legal.
You're just skirting around the issue. Apple is attacking first sale doctrine by "selling" everything as a license only. SCOTUS denied an appeal to see a sale of software as an actual copy subject to the first sale doctrine. You may see that as fine but it's an astonishingly huge ruling that companies can just sell "licenses" of copyrighted material to impinge the rights of customers granted by copyright law. The ruling against Psystar was to apply the EULA that went along with it, but that's merely consequential of the larger issue.
And Apple certainly does hold a monopoly on hardware that is permitted to run OSX in a non-EULA violating manner. There's no reason the two should be coupled and IANAL but I'd expect there to be a valid case here for Apple's tying of their hardware to OSX as a violation of various antitrust acts. The tying of iPhones to AT&T was upheld as unlawful in 2010, and I'm surprised it wasn't argued that the tying of OSX to Apple hardware (which is, in some cases, up to three times as expensive as identical competitor hardware) is comparable to the tying of Internet Explorer to Windows (which has caused a lot of controversy). Though if OSX is only ever licensed, it doesn't appear that it it would be subject to litigation in this arena. So this license-only thing seems like a huge umbrella of protection for companies and there's certainly no way one can see this as fair to consumers. That is why it's so obnoxious to see the SCOTUS uphold the behavior as legal. It's terrible.
I thought it would be obvious that you'd elevate it in some kind of container, not by just letting it freely escape into our atmosphere. I can imagine designs from a balloon-like apparatus designed to sit at a certain height in our atmosphere and be collected by a series of satellites to something as outlandish as an enormous space-elevator for hydrogen (essentially an enormous tube connected to earth and held in position by inertia and earth's gravity). The only problem with that idea is it requires you constantly maintain the density of gasses at all elevations in the tube. If the tube is airtight, you could potentially fill it with any number of very heavy gasses (moreso than O2/N2). Then you pump hydrogen in from the ground level and it would rise to the top and increase the pressure of the system. With a good distance in density from hydrogen from the filler gas, a very hard barrier should exist at the top of the tube, and at any given pressure, no more hydrogen would be introduced from the ground and several minutes later all hydrogen at the top would be removed (easy, the tube is pressurized, so the denser gas should push the hydrogen right through an opening on the top). Once pressure is re-normalized, repeat. I'm just a software engineer with a very basic understanding of fluid dynamics and Newtonian physics and I don't have any problems coming up with solutions here. Surely Ph.D.s and researchers in this field would be able to create something fantastically efficient.
Gasses can be condensed using temperature as well, imagine this process happening in space, where an absence of heat is abundant. Gaseous hydrogen will gladly float beyond our atmosphere, at which point it can be easily compressed and then gravity will bring it back down to earth. I don't think this problem has to require an enormous amount of energy to solve. And that process of moving hydrogen to space can also generate electricity...