Even more at issue: Steam's "subscriber policy" implies that all software purchased in Steam is merely a subscription to Steam's license, meaning you have no license, no ownership, no copy ownership, and effectively no rights at all afforded to you by any Federal, State, or Local laws regarding licensed software, copyrights, or consumer purchases that do not apply to subscriptions. It is unacceptable in a general purpose software store to be required to bind all rights granted under law regarding the purchase of software. It's about time someone take Steam to court regarding the most probable illegality of its policies. WIth them ripping off people individually to the tune of $5-$50, selling software that they do not support that can potentially fail to run on your system, getting a "refund" is impossible, and at best you may eventually get them to refund you the purchase price in your Steam Wallet, but not the actual money spent. In the event of defective products being sold, in most states in the US, a full refund or a functional replacement is required. Steam blatantly violated this law and quite a few others in my own personal dealings with them, so I've asked the EFF for a legal opinion on whether or not their Subscriber agreement is even remotely legal and if it gives them the ability to completely ignore laws and nickel-and-dime US taxpayers.
In the end, we should completely refuse to purchase anything on Steam until Valve corrects this issue (yes, compliance with laws is expensive, boohoo), and until such time, simply purchase the games from the producers directly and merely use Steam as a game organizer.
CSS, caching, HTML5, and input hints. Those issues have solutions. The problem is that nobody makes mobile websites very well, you just have normal websites and "mobile" ones that are smaller and have fewer hard-to-click things (they're basically the full version of the site but gutted to bare minimum) and then a native app which is really what the mobile version of the website should've been in the first place.
There's the fundamental logic failure that these companies don't comprehend. It's not about whether you can sell more new copies and that you're losing money when Gamestop sells a used copy, it's that a used copy WAS SOLD TO A PERSON LOOKING TO BUY A USED COPY. When I want a used game, I look in the used games bin. I don't look in the used games bin, walk over to the shiny "new" display, and buy a new copy. Likewise, I don't look at the "new" display and walk over to the used games bin and buy a used game. When I want a new game, I buy a new game. When I want a used game, I buy a used game. Selling a used game does not in any way impact a new game sale. They don't harm the industry. I am unwilling to buy MOST games at full retail price, but am willing to try them when I can recoup most of my lost by buying used and re-selling when I'm done. If they want me to buy more new games at full price, they should make fewer shitty games and just expect to be able to sell every B quality title at $60 a pop with no replay value and 20 hours of gameplay max. This is the same reason most people don't buy games at full price on Steam (they are OK with throwing away $5 to try a game, but not $30). They are two entirely different markets. What these game companies fail to comprehend is that they are typically mutually exclusive, and the used market keeps their game franchises, IP, and related products alive for a LOT longer than forcing people to buy and throw away new copies every time.
I think in our current political context we mean layers and the abusive anti-citizen pro-corporate laws they've helped create and abuse, and the whole concept of a corporation being able to sue an individual, etc. Of course, killing all of the lawyers, including the ones that actually protect us, would be a very bad thing. The same idea applies to the congresspeople that propose such clearly anti-American bills (it's treason, and it needs to be seen as such) or who block good bills by introducing terrible amendments, etc. Basically "kill corruption." Pretty hard to do without just completely obliterating our legal system and starting over from scratch, because to change the fundamental bad decisions require unanimous or supermajority votes (like amendments), and those don't happen unless it's about racism, sexism, abolition, or defense funding.
Many resale outlets provide a free unlimited digital download for products while retaining your rights as a licensor or a copyright owner. It's only when you buy things through Steam that you forfeit rights. I think the only thing you get by buying a game on Steam is tight integration with their authentication system for achievements. Are achievements worth signing away all rights you have? This is not limited to the first sale doctrine. It includes all of copyright law including fair use, which is fundamental to things like recording gameplay or sharing screenshots.
Scalping in HFT is basically the same as someone walking over to your table and picking up the tip left for the restaurant because it's technically more than the bill says you should have paid. I don't care what legal bullshit anyone wants to claim, it's theft. It forces me to pay more for a stock because the difference wasn't refunded, or the seller to eat just the value they were willing to sell at instead of the difference in the event that they found a buyer at a higher rate than expected. Those are profits already spoken for, a third party has no right to interject itself and have the difference just because it can do things in 2ms versus our few thousand ms requests. Zero added value, and theft. Yeah, that should be completely illegal.
should involve regulations that limit the rate at which trades can be made or that put a cost on high-frequency trades such as to remove their profit incentives. It's an investment market, we don't need thieves grabbing mismatched buy/sell orders and sitting in the middle shaving pennies off transactions. You know all those movies where someone proposes "rounding" sub-penny transaction losses down to the nearest penny and adding them all to a bank account? Someone on Wall Street saw that and said "bro, we can totally do this lulz! Just give us a way to trade faster than anyone else, and we'll make BILLIONS!" How is this still legal? I mean by every definition this is theft. I, for one, don't want to see us trying to come up with technologies to help these billionaires continue robbing you, me, and everyone else.
Since I found it interesting that you call it an "app store," I decided to compare the two largest app stores on the planet to Steam. Here's Google Play's stance on consumer rights:
Direct, Agency and App Sales. When you buy Products from Google Play you will buy them either:
(a) directly from Google (which is referred to as “Google”, “we”, “our”, or “us” in these Terms) (a “Direct Sale”);
(b) from the provider of the Product (the “Provider”), where Google is acting as agent for the Provider (an “Agency Sale”); or
(c) in the case of Android apps, from the Provider of the app (an “App Sale”).
Each time that you purchase a Product, you enter into a contract based on these Terms with: Google in relation to the use of Google Play and (in the case of a Direct Sale) the purchase of that Product; and also (in the case of Agency Sales and App Sales) with the Provider of the Product you have purchased.
And here's iTunes':
The software products made available through the Mac App Store and App Store (collectively, the “App Store Products”) are licensed, not sold, to you. There are two (2) categories of App Store Products, as follows: (i) those App Store Products that have been developed, and are licensed to you, by Apple ( “Apple Products”); and (ii) those App Store Products that have been developed, and are licensed to you, by a third-party developer ( “Third-Party Products”). The category of a particular App Store Product (Apple Product or Third-Party Product) is identified on the Mac App Store application or App Store application.
Your license to each App Store Product is subject to the Licensed Application End User License Agreement set forth below, and you agree that such terms will apply unless the App Store Product is covered by a valid end user license agreement entered into between you and the licensor of that App Store Product (the “Application Provider”), in which case the Application Provider’s end user license agreement will apply to that App Store Product. The Application Provider reserves all rights in and to the App Store Product not expressly granted to you.
You acknowledge that the license to each Apple Product that you obtain through the App Store Services, as defined below, is a binding agreement between you and Apple. You acknowledge that: you are acquiring the license to each Third-Party Product from the Application Provider; Apple is acting as agent for the Application Provider in providing each such Third-Party Product to you; and Apple is not a party to the license between you and the Application Provider with respect to that Third-Party Product. The Application Provider of each Third-Party Product is solely responsible for that Third-Party Product, the content therein, any warranties to the extent that such warranties have not been disclaimed, and any claims that you or any other party may have relating to that Third-Party Product.
You acknowledge and agree that Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of the Licensed Application End User License Agreement or the Application Provider’s end user license agreement, as the case may be, for each Third-Party Product. You also agree that, upon your acceptance of the terms and conditions of the license to any such Third-Party Product, Apple will have the right (and will be deemed to have accepted the right) to enforce such license against you as a third-party beneficiary thereof.
It's intriguing, really. Neither of these require forfeiture of rights. Yet for some reason, Valve insists on it with Steam. I expect the very first time that Valve faces a serious lawsuit from Steam that this model will come tumbling down; that there will be a ruling that you cannot simply call a sale of a product something else in an attempt
Re-selling is just one of a very long list of rights that consumers typically have, including those granted by copyright law, contract law, state/local consumer laws, etc. If you buy a game for $60 on Steam instead of buying the game for $60 from the company that makes it, and they substantially change the game such that it's nothing like what it was advertised, those who bought the game outright from the company have a lot of legal room to fight for a refund and punitive damages. If you bought it on Steam, not only are you fucked and have no rights at all, but you can't participate in a class action (not because the Steam sub agreement says you agree not to, but because that class action isn't against Steam, and you only have a contract with Steam). It's the worst possible idea ever. That people don't care indicates how SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, ACTA, etc are making any headway at all. Give up rights for convenience and you might as well just shoot yourself now for contributing to the degradation of not only our legal system and rights but to those of pretty much every country on this planet.
What's next? Medical products and services being covered in a similar manner, so when a company sells a drug that kills millions of people that you have bound your rights so you get the drug for $5 instead of $500, but you can't sue for damages? Waiving rights to sue for negligence if a car manufacturer makes a defective vehicle or knowingly uses a defective part killing hundreds, and to agree to never re-sell it, just because you can get a car for $5000, and have free oil changes? I mean, sure, these are bad examples because they're criminal charges, and because you can't really have someone sign basic rights away in a contract, but if you could, would you really want to? It's highly questionable whether the Steam business model is even remotely legal because it hasn't ever been challenged, but this is effectively what they do. Oh noes, it's just video games! Yeah, and the DMCA was just about video recording devices, and SOPA is just to prevent illegal consumption of music and movies. While the downsides of bills like those are much more obvious to all of us, the real answer to Steam apologists and agnostics or ignorants is: fuck off, it's about a bigger picture, and whether you can see it or not. If you support Steam but were opposed to SOPA, you're a massive hypocrite. Consider that.
It also does another thing: it removes all consumer rights from the consumers. This alone should kill Steam's current model, but it appears they've done a great job at not advertising that fact, and very few people point it out. They even say "buy" and "own" in their store, so I guess they desperately want people to be oblivious to their business model. Fantastic, and probably horribly illegal.
Are you sure? I'm quite positive a single core right now can produce data more quickly on any BUS in your system than the hardware on the other end can process if all it does is send data. So having a single thread responsible for sending data/commands as its only job shouldn't be a bottleneck to what the hardware can handle. I'd expect that DX just does this for you in its usermode driver so you don't have to think about the "super hard, complex code" that is involved with handling a threaded queue. The same can likely easily be done in OpenGL if it isn't already in modern engines or in some library I can't be bothered to look up.
found that cigarettes do not cause cancer. Additionally, smoking cigarettes has the following benefits, probably demonstrated by Tobacco research:
They increase your coolness factor by 5 points.
They increase your expected annual salary by 15%
They increase the likelihood that you will get laid on any given night by 23%
They decrease the risk of looking like an idiot, since nobody standing around smoking a cigarette can look like an idiot.
They cause weight gain or weight loss, depending on whether you want to gain or lose.
They cure the common cold, reduce flu symptoms to 1 day, and potentially cure cancer (we're still checking on that one).
They inhibit the AIDS virus, no seriously.
They also increase lung capacity, so if you want to be an Olympic athlete, you should smoke cigarettes!
In all seriousness, what self-funded studies that find negative things are actually published? You should expect that a headline saying "X funded self study Y" where X is some business that is commonly cited to have some problem and Y is some contention to that commonly held problem. I'm citing this as jMerliN's law of headlines.
4.3M of which is Webkit, which is developed by Apple. That figure also includes a massive number of tools, 3rd party libraries, testing code, chrome frame, etc. Chrome itself isn't that large. V8 is also its own completely separate project (albeit still maintained and developed by Google). And Chrome shares code with Chromium, too. The point is that it's not one monolithic behemoth like QB. It's a very nice ecosystem of well behaved, well written, and well maintained pieces working together, not some enormous 10Mloc monster that can't be maintained to any reasonable degree.
I just put my iPhone 3Gs, an iPhone 4, and my Galaxy Nexus side by side by side. Anyone who doesn't clearly see the Nexus as completely different from either of the iPhones is a complete moron. They're nothing alike. This lawsuit is beyond stupid.
I say slap Apple with a multi-hundred million dollar fine for wasting taxpayer money and to keep them from being dickheads again and require them to put on their website "Samsung Android Phones Do Not Look Like iPhones" at least 10 billion times, and it should be hand-written, not computer generated, so everyone in the company has to write a few thousand lines.
I disagree. When I read more about the Q, I was confident that it would fail. Why? You don't create a general purpose computer, put Android on it, and market it to a bunch of tech enthusiasts when you only give the YouTube and Google Play apps the capability to render to the screen. That's a completely broken model, ESPECIALLY for the target audience. Bad idea.
That said, this device is quite capable. Sure, you have annoyances about input issues, but that can be solved if the platform is opened by third-party controllers/remotes. If you'll recall, the Ouya is just a little box that runs Android. If they remove all the red tape in this device and open it up to developers, it can easily eat the entire market that Ouya would've had, long before Ouya's official launch, AND it can still support all the awesome stuff Google wanted to put on it.
The Q has the potential to be awesome. Google just has to let go of their fears of it being used for piracy and open the device. Then we'll see something pretty awesome.
Based on facts and evidence, not my opinions. Learn to read and comprehend before you troll, thanks. We call this scientific evidence. It tends to trump opinion pieces like most of Joel's work.
Then you've just pointed out a huge design flaw: even if there are millions of tax rules over decades that need to be accounted for, you don't do it with code. I've seen projects that can scale to post-processing effects like this and they don't do it with code. The magnitude of the problem doesn't imply a need for a lot of code, nor a complex solution. It's harder to maintain code than it is to write code. That's the entire principle behind modern software engineering: if you don't have to write code, don't. I don't want 200 programmers hammering out specific edge-case tax rules in my software. You don't maintain code written like that.
This is more in the spirit of my response. That's the point I meant to make; by today's standards, what they have might be "the wrong thing to do." With the significant advances in in almost area of software engineering platforms, frameworks, libraries, and engineering principles we've had since a majority of the product was designed, my expectation is that it will be significantly smaller, significantly faster, much easier to maintain, and naturally much more stable a product. If I owned QB, I would be spending a few tens of millions refactoring my product with the latest technologies.
Look at Chrome. It's constantly inundated with the latest and greatest in many areas. It's arguably the best browser that has ever existed. And it pushed Firefox to behave in the same way, which has made it a better browser too, and Google pushes those changes up to V8 and WebKit, which in turn make Safari and anything else that uses WebKit better (like Netflix on non-PC platforms) or anything that uses V8 better (Chrome OS, Node.JS, etc). This modularization and projects sharing dependencies is important and fundamental to this rapid progress and high quality. These are lessons that could be used to make QB significantly better than it is today.
That article isn't particularly correct, on the one hand, and it's not apt in this discussion at all. Creating a competing product is not a refactoring, and reducing millions of lines of code to a few hundred thousand is almost certainly going to massively increase maintainability..
For example:
It's important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time
That's just flat out untrue. Everything around us is constantly improving. Database techniques, database systems, file systems, operating systems, APIs, networking, hardware, engineering principles, and the trends that accompany these changes, libraries that do a lot of the stuff you did manually, etc. I've seen fairly large JS apps written years ago before wide adoption of tiny-yet-powerful libraries reduced by over a factor of 30x in code size. That's moving non-DRY code into a more maintainable fashion. It's sound architecturally. You see, Joel also advocates this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html. This is in many ways contradictory to that very statement. While you may not necessarily have MORE EXPERIENCE from the team re-writing it, you have the advances in computing which are constantly growing. To deny that this would have a significant impact in re-engineering a product is foolish.
As much respect as I have for Joel and his experience, some of his beliefs are just wrong in the world of software engineering.
There isn't any need for it. I suspect it's because they're doing things horribly, horribly wrong. I'd be willing to bet a few billion dollars that a competent group of people could implement QB in under a quarter of the lines of code while both improving the quality and making it significantly faster in every regard.
Those are typically not upheld in court. From the research I've done, it's fairly consistent that purchases of physical media get rulings sympathetic with consumer rights (rights granted by copyright law, meaning first sale, etc). Digital is a little more hazy, it can go either way depending, but binding a purchase to an account typically makes it impossible to sell the media alone separate from an account, which violates a EULA that isn't related to the game. Though if the reasoning behind the ruling seen recently in the EU that licenses are equivalent to copies under copyright law makes it into the US, we may well see it become required that these companies let you sell your license to another person. The thing about Steam is that it goes even further. You don't purchase a license. We're normally afforded SOME rights under the terms of a license agreement and contract law (it's a contract, the company on the other end of it can be found in violation of it, too). Steam proxies itself between you and the company that owns the IP and only sells you a subscription to that license, rather than the license. And if you read their Subscriber Agreement, it basically says you can't do anything. A contract dispute between you and Steam will never involve the company that owns the game, and you can't sue them under affordances normally granted by your licensing their software. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not actually sure what Steam's doing is legal. I can't conceptually differentiate between it and movie rental services like Netflix (you don't own a movie when you watch it, you just have access to watch it whenever you want), aside from revocation which isn't an issue here (Netflix has lost deals with producers resulting in content removal, that's unlikely to ever happen in Steam, since their license grants them pretty heavy distribution powers).
The one exception is that there's an expectation of state in Steam vs. the appearance of a public demonstration in a service like Netflix. That state implies ownership where the public-demonstration nature of Netflix makes it more of a pay-per-view type situation (like a theater) where Steam is more a pay-for-access (which implies a contract or a license). I would hope that at some point in the future this "subscription" trick is seen as equivalent to owning a copy (as well as licensing == copy) so that there are no more loopholes to do an end-run around consumer rights.
In summary: while your argument about licenses being potentially as Evil as Steam's subscription model is valid, I believe because it is effectively another layer of indirection on top of the license issue (a weaker still license to a license to a copy of a game, if you will), it goes even further in removing consumer rights, and is therefore worse.
Fine. But it really should be considered an invasion of privacy (and potentially a violation of federal communications laws) for Google or any other search engine to give non-anonymized search data, e-mail, or any usage metrics to the federal government without a warrant. Like, people going to jail for life for it. Including people at Google for complying and everyone at the NSA who knew about it. We summarily dismissed legislation earlier this year that would've given companies impunity from this, so I will assume that because they were drafting legislation to cover their asses that it's completely illegal. Prison sentences. Let's get em started.
Except Steam requires that you forfeit all consumer rights when you purchase anything through it, meaning you own nothing. If it weren't for the fact that you have you bind your rights to buy games, it would be a pretty good system overall.
Except you don't own anything you buy on Steam. There's that little thing. Everything else about Steam is pretty good. But it's a bit like promising your soul to the devil. You're binding ALL consumer rights when you buy from the Steam store. You are only allowed to do what Valve says you can do. That's in many ways far worse than anything Ubisoft has ever done, including this.
Except you never actually own anything you buy on Steam. That's a pretty huge difference. Complete forfeiture of consumer rights is not acceptable, ever.
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Even more at issue: Steam's "subscriber policy" implies that all software purchased in Steam is merely a subscription to Steam's license, meaning you have no license, no ownership, no copy ownership, and effectively no rights at all afforded to you by any Federal, State, or Local laws regarding licensed software, copyrights, or consumer purchases that do not apply to subscriptions. It is unacceptable in a general purpose software store to be required to bind all rights granted under law regarding the purchase of software. It's about time someone take Steam to court regarding the most probable illegality of its policies. WIth them ripping off people individually to the tune of $5-$50, selling software that they do not support that can potentially fail to run on your system, getting a "refund" is impossible, and at best you may eventually get them to refund you the purchase price in your Steam Wallet, but not the actual money spent. In the event of defective products being sold, in most states in the US, a full refund or a functional replacement is required. Steam blatantly violated this law and quite a few others in my own personal dealings with them, so I've asked the EFF for a legal opinion on whether or not their Subscriber agreement is even remotely legal and if it gives them the ability to completely ignore laws and nickel-and-dime US taxpayers.
In the end, we should completely refuse to purchase anything on Steam until Valve corrects this issue (yes, compliance with laws is expensive, boohoo), and until such time, simply purchase the games from the producers directly and merely use Steam as a game organizer.
CSS, caching, HTML5, and input hints. Those issues have solutions. The problem is that nobody makes mobile websites very well, you just have normal websites and "mobile" ones that are smaller and have fewer hard-to-click things (they're basically the full version of the site but gutted to bare minimum) and then a native app which is really what the mobile version of the website should've been in the first place.
There's the fundamental logic failure that these companies don't comprehend. It's not about whether you can sell more new copies and that you're losing money when Gamestop sells a used copy, it's that a used copy WAS SOLD TO A PERSON LOOKING TO BUY A USED COPY. When I want a used game, I look in the used games bin. I don't look in the used games bin, walk over to the shiny "new" display, and buy a new copy. Likewise, I don't look at the "new" display and walk over to the used games bin and buy a used game. When I want a new game, I buy a new game. When I want a used game, I buy a used game. Selling a used game does not in any way impact a new game sale. They don't harm the industry. I am unwilling to buy MOST games at full retail price, but am willing to try them when I can recoup most of my lost by buying used and re-selling when I'm done. If they want me to buy more new games at full price, they should make fewer shitty games and just expect to be able to sell every B quality title at $60 a pop with no replay value and 20 hours of gameplay max. This is the same reason most people don't buy games at full price on Steam (they are OK with throwing away $5 to try a game, but not $30). They are two entirely different markets. What these game companies fail to comprehend is that they are typically mutually exclusive, and the used market keeps their game franchises, IP, and related products alive for a LOT longer than forcing people to buy and throw away new copies every time.
I think in our current political context we mean layers and the abusive anti-citizen pro-corporate laws they've helped create and abuse, and the whole concept of a corporation being able to sue an individual, etc. Of course, killing all of the lawyers, including the ones that actually protect us, would be a very bad thing. The same idea applies to the congresspeople that propose such clearly anti-American bills (it's treason, and it needs to be seen as such) or who block good bills by introducing terrible amendments, etc. Basically "kill corruption." Pretty hard to do without just completely obliterating our legal system and starting over from scratch, because to change the fundamental bad decisions require unanimous or supermajority votes (like amendments), and those don't happen unless it's about racism, sexism, abolition, or defense funding.
Many resale outlets provide a free unlimited digital download for products while retaining your rights as a licensor or a copyright owner. It's only when you buy things through Steam that you forfeit rights. I think the only thing you get by buying a game on Steam is tight integration with their authentication system for achievements. Are achievements worth signing away all rights you have? This is not limited to the first sale doctrine. It includes all of copyright law including fair use, which is fundamental to things like recording gameplay or sharing screenshots.
Scalping in HFT is basically the same as someone walking over to your table and picking up the tip left for the restaurant because it's technically more than the bill says you should have paid. I don't care what legal bullshit anyone wants to claim, it's theft. It forces me to pay more for a stock because the difference wasn't refunded, or the seller to eat just the value they were willing to sell at instead of the difference in the event that they found a buyer at a higher rate than expected. Those are profits already spoken for, a third party has no right to interject itself and have the difference just because it can do things in 2ms versus our few thousand ms requests. Zero added value, and theft. Yeah, that should be completely illegal.
should involve regulations that limit the rate at which trades can be made or that put a cost on high-frequency trades such as to remove their profit incentives. It's an investment market, we don't need thieves grabbing mismatched buy/sell orders and sitting in the middle shaving pennies off transactions. You know all those movies where someone proposes "rounding" sub-penny transaction losses down to the nearest penny and adding them all to a bank account? Someone on Wall Street saw that and said "bro, we can totally do this lulz! Just give us a way to trade faster than anyone else, and we'll make BILLIONS!" How is this still legal? I mean by every definition this is theft. I, for one, don't want to see us trying to come up with technologies to help these billionaires continue robbing you, me, and everyone else.
And here's iTunes':
It's intriguing, really. Neither of these require forfeiture of rights. Yet for some reason, Valve insists on it with Steam. I expect the very first time that Valve faces a serious lawsuit from Steam that this model will come tumbling down; that there will be a ruling that you cannot simply call a sale of a product something else in an attempt
Re-selling is just one of a very long list of rights that consumers typically have, including those granted by copyright law, contract law, state/local consumer laws, etc. If you buy a game for $60 on Steam instead of buying the game for $60 from the company that makes it, and they substantially change the game such that it's nothing like what it was advertised, those who bought the game outright from the company have a lot of legal room to fight for a refund and punitive damages. If you bought it on Steam, not only are you fucked and have no rights at all, but you can't participate in a class action (not because the Steam sub agreement says you agree not to, but because that class action isn't against Steam, and you only have a contract with Steam). It's the worst possible idea ever. That people don't care indicates how SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, ACTA, etc are making any headway at all. Give up rights for convenience and you might as well just shoot yourself now for contributing to the degradation of not only our legal system and rights but to those of pretty much every country on this planet.
What's next? Medical products and services being covered in a similar manner, so when a company sells a drug that kills millions of people that you have bound your rights so you get the drug for $5 instead of $500, but you can't sue for damages? Waiving rights to sue for negligence if a car manufacturer makes a defective vehicle or knowingly uses a defective part killing hundreds, and to agree to never re-sell it, just because you can get a car for $5000, and have free oil changes? I mean, sure, these are bad examples because they're criminal charges, and because you can't really have someone sign basic rights away in a contract, but if you could, would you really want to? It's highly questionable whether the Steam business model is even remotely legal because it hasn't ever been challenged, but this is effectively what they do. Oh noes, it's just video games! Yeah, and the DMCA was just about video recording devices, and SOPA is just to prevent illegal consumption of music and movies. While the downsides of bills like those are much more obvious to all of us, the real answer to Steam apologists and agnostics or ignorants is: fuck off, it's about a bigger picture, and whether you can see it or not. If you support Steam but were opposed to SOPA, you're a massive hypocrite. Consider that.
It also does another thing: it removes all consumer rights from the consumers. This alone should kill Steam's current model, but it appears they've done a great job at not advertising that fact, and very few people point it out. They even say "buy" and "own" in their store, so I guess they desperately want people to be oblivious to their business model. Fantastic, and probably horribly illegal.
Are you sure? I'm quite positive a single core right now can produce data more quickly on any BUS in your system than the hardware on the other end can process if all it does is send data. So having a single thread responsible for sending data/commands as its only job shouldn't be a bottleneck to what the hardware can handle. I'd expect that DX just does this for you in its usermode driver so you don't have to think about the "super hard, complex code" that is involved with handling a threaded queue. The same can likely easily be done in OpenGL if it isn't already in modern engines or in some library I can't be bothered to look up.
found that cigarettes do not cause cancer. Additionally, smoking cigarettes has the following benefits, probably demonstrated by Tobacco research:
They increase your coolness factor by 5 points.
They increase your expected annual salary by 15%
They increase the likelihood that you will get laid on any given night by 23%
They decrease the risk of looking like an idiot, since nobody standing around smoking a cigarette can look like an idiot.
They cause weight gain or weight loss, depending on whether you want to gain or lose.
They cure the common cold, reduce flu symptoms to 1 day, and potentially cure cancer (we're still checking on that one).
They inhibit the AIDS virus, no seriously.
They also increase lung capacity, so if you want to be an Olympic athlete, you should smoke cigarettes!
In all seriousness, what self-funded studies that find negative things are actually published? You should expect that a headline saying "X funded self study Y" where X is some business that is commonly cited to have some problem and Y is some contention to that commonly held problem. I'm citing this as jMerliN's law of headlines.
4.3M of which is Webkit, which is developed by Apple. That figure also includes a massive number of tools, 3rd party libraries, testing code, chrome frame, etc. Chrome itself isn't that large. V8 is also its own completely separate project (albeit still maintained and developed by Google). And Chrome shares code with Chromium, too. The point is that it's not one monolithic behemoth like QB. It's a very nice ecosystem of well behaved, well written, and well maintained pieces working together, not some enormous 10Mloc monster that can't be maintained to any reasonable degree.
I just put my iPhone 3Gs, an iPhone 4, and my Galaxy Nexus side by side by side. Anyone who doesn't clearly see the Nexus as completely different from either of the iPhones is a complete moron. They're nothing alike. This lawsuit is beyond stupid.
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK7BiEUBtxw
I say slap Apple with a multi-hundred million dollar fine for wasting taxpayer money and to keep them from being dickheads again and require them to put on their website "Samsung Android Phones Do Not Look Like iPhones" at least 10 billion times, and it should be hand-written, not computer generated, so everyone in the company has to write a few thousand lines.
I disagree. When I read more about the Q, I was confident that it would fail. Why? You don't create a general purpose computer, put Android on it, and market it to a bunch of tech enthusiasts when you only give the YouTube and Google Play apps the capability to render to the screen. That's a completely broken model, ESPECIALLY for the target audience. Bad idea.
That said, this device is quite capable. Sure, you have annoyances about input issues, but that can be solved if the platform is opened by third-party controllers/remotes. If you'll recall, the Ouya is just a little box that runs Android. If they remove all the red tape in this device and open it up to developers, it can easily eat the entire market that Ouya would've had, long before Ouya's official launch, AND it can still support all the awesome stuff Google wanted to put on it.
The Q has the potential to be awesome. Google just has to let go of their fears of it being used for piracy and open the device. Then we'll see something pretty awesome.
Based on facts and evidence, not my opinions. Learn to read and comprehend before you troll, thanks. We call this scientific evidence. It tends to trump opinion pieces like most of Joel's work.
Then you've just pointed out a huge design flaw: even if there are millions of tax rules over decades that need to be accounted for, you don't do it with code. I've seen projects that can scale to post-processing effects like this and they don't do it with code. The magnitude of the problem doesn't imply a need for a lot of code, nor a complex solution. It's harder to maintain code than it is to write code. That's the entire principle behind modern software engineering: if you don't have to write code, don't. I don't want 200 programmers hammering out specific edge-case tax rules in my software. You don't maintain code written like that.
This is more in the spirit of my response. That's the point I meant to make; by today's standards, what they have might be "the wrong thing to do." With the significant advances in in almost area of software engineering platforms, frameworks, libraries, and engineering principles we've had since a majority of the product was designed, my expectation is that it will be significantly smaller, significantly faster, much easier to maintain, and naturally much more stable a product. If I owned QB, I would be spending a few tens of millions refactoring my product with the latest technologies.
Look at Chrome. It's constantly inundated with the latest and greatest in many areas. It's arguably the best browser that has ever existed. And it pushed Firefox to behave in the same way, which has made it a better browser too, and Google pushes those changes up to V8 and WebKit, which in turn make Safari and anything else that uses WebKit better (like Netflix on non-PC platforms) or anything that uses V8 better (Chrome OS, Node.JS, etc). This modularization and projects sharing dependencies is important and fundamental to this rapid progress and high quality. These are lessons that could be used to make QB significantly better than it is today.
For example:
That's just flat out untrue. Everything around us is constantly improving. Database techniques, database systems, file systems, operating systems, APIs, networking, hardware, engineering principles, and the trends that accompany these changes, libraries that do a lot of the stuff you did manually, etc. I've seen fairly large JS apps written years ago before wide adoption of tiny-yet-powerful libraries reduced by over a factor of 30x in code size. That's moving non-DRY code into a more maintainable fashion. It's sound architecturally. You see, Joel also advocates this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html. This is in many ways contradictory to that very statement. While you may not necessarily have MORE EXPERIENCE from the team re-writing it, you have the advances in computing which are constantly growing. To deny that this would have a significant impact in re-engineering a product is foolish.
As much respect as I have for Joel and his experience, some of his beliefs are just wrong in the world of software engineering.
There isn't any need for it. I suspect it's because they're doing things horribly, horribly wrong. I'd be willing to bet a few billion dollars that a competent group of people could implement QB in under a quarter of the lines of code while both improving the quality and making it significantly faster in every regard.
Those are typically not upheld in court. From the research I've done, it's fairly consistent that purchases of physical media get rulings sympathetic with consumer rights (rights granted by copyright law, meaning first sale, etc). Digital is a little more hazy, it can go either way depending, but binding a purchase to an account typically makes it impossible to sell the media alone separate from an account, which violates a EULA that isn't related to the game. Though if the reasoning behind the ruling seen recently in the EU that licenses are equivalent to copies under copyright law makes it into the US, we may well see it become required that these companies let you sell your license to another person. The thing about Steam is that it goes even further. You don't purchase a license. We're normally afforded SOME rights under the terms of a license agreement and contract law (it's a contract, the company on the other end of it can be found in violation of it, too). Steam proxies itself between you and the company that owns the IP and only sells you a subscription to that license, rather than the license. And if you read their Subscriber Agreement, it basically says you can't do anything. A contract dispute between you and Steam will never involve the company that owns the game, and you can't sue them under affordances normally granted by your licensing their software. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not actually sure what Steam's doing is legal. I can't conceptually differentiate between it and movie rental services like Netflix (you don't own a movie when you watch it, you just have access to watch it whenever you want), aside from revocation which isn't an issue here (Netflix has lost deals with producers resulting in content removal, that's unlikely to ever happen in Steam, since their license grants them pretty heavy distribution powers).
The one exception is that there's an expectation of state in Steam vs. the appearance of a public demonstration in a service like Netflix. That state implies ownership where the public-demonstration nature of Netflix makes it more of a pay-per-view type situation (like a theater) where Steam is more a pay-for-access (which implies a contract or a license). I would hope that at some point in the future this "subscription" trick is seen as equivalent to owning a copy (as well as licensing == copy) so that there are no more loopholes to do an end-run around consumer rights.
In summary: while your argument about licenses being potentially as Evil as Steam's subscription model is valid, I believe because it is effectively another layer of indirection on top of the license issue (a weaker still license to a license to a copy of a game, if you will), it goes even further in removing consumer rights, and is therefore worse.
Fine. But it really should be considered an invasion of privacy (and potentially a violation of federal communications laws) for Google or any other search engine to give non-anonymized search data, e-mail, or any usage metrics to the federal government without a warrant. Like, people going to jail for life for it. Including people at Google for complying and everyone at the NSA who knew about it. We summarily dismissed legislation earlier this year that would've given companies impunity from this, so I will assume that because they were drafting legislation to cover their asses that it's completely illegal. Prison sentences. Let's get em started.
Except Steam requires that you forfeit all consumer rights when you purchase anything through it, meaning you own nothing. If it weren't for the fact that you have you bind your rights to buy games, it would be a pretty good system overall.
Except you don't own anything you buy on Steam. There's that little thing. Everything else about Steam is pretty good. But it's a bit like promising your soul to the devil. You're binding ALL consumer rights when you buy from the Steam store. You are only allowed to do what Valve says you can do. That's in many ways far worse than anything Ubisoft has ever done, including this.
Except you never actually own anything you buy on Steam. That's a pretty huge difference. Complete forfeiture of consumer rights is not acceptable, ever.